Isolation And Quarantine

Testing Plan with Partners

Tabletop (TT) exercises were created to test the emerging I & Q plan with community partners. TT exercises are tools used in emergency management to gather individuals who play a role in emergency response in an informal, low-stress setting to analyze simulated emergency situations.

During a TT exercise, a facilitator presents a detailed, hypothetical emergency scenario and participants talk through what they would do (guided by the emergency response plan). Along the way, participants thoroughly discuss each step of their response, offering their reactions and raising questions and issues that might arise in that situation. Tips for developing and delivering TT exercises and a sample TT presentation are included in the Tools & Samples section.

One of the challenges in creating a TT exercise is to determine the scope of what is to be tested. We wanted to test the parts of the I & Q response plan that involved community partners. We developed a TT exercise to only test specific aspects of our I & Q plan for that scope. Desired outcomes of the TT exercise were to determine answers to the following questions:

• Did our community partners have the capacity needed to provide non-medical services to quarantined individuals?
• Are Public Health and the community partners able to communicate so that all necessary information is effectively conveyed between them?
• Are all involved agencies able to protect client confidentiality and maintain consistent public health messages?

Ultimately, the TT exercises allowed us to assess the community partners" capacities, and just as important, we were able to identify issues that we hadn't yet anticipated.