HSS Recovery Operations

 

Section Overview

By the end of the section, you should be able to:

  • Describe the flow of activities that characterize recovery operations.
  • Describe the steps of the recovery operations process.
  • Identify methods for achieving an efficient transition of services.
  • Describe the phrases of federal HSS RSF operations and its primary support activities. 
List of sections – Section 1: The HSS Recovery Support Function (checkmark), Section 2: HSS Recovery Coordination (checkmark), Section 3: HSS Recovery Operations (arrow), Section 4: HSS Recovery in Practice
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This course should take approximately 46 minutes to complete.

HSS RSF Recovery Objectives

The three core objectives of the HSS RSF during disaster recovery are:

Medical icon; Support the restoration of basic healthcare, public health, and social services function
Assess community health and social service impacts, identify gaps, and triage communities of focus
Enhance and improve the resilience and capacity of health care systems and social services networks with an eye toward sustainability
These objectives are the fundamental guide for all HSS RSF operations.

The Flow of Recovery Operations

HSS RSF operations are characterized by a flow of activities that are similar to those of disaster response. However, their execution and duration are distinctly different. In terms of activity, recovery operations can be broken into three overlapping phases.

Graph showing effort and resources (y-axis) and initial action, recovery operations, and transition (x-axis) – At initial actions: Stakeholder Identification, Relationship Development, Impact Assessment, Immediate Assistance; Between initial actions and recover operations: Mobilization, Organization, Coordination; At recovery operations: Interim service provision, Recovery projects and programs, Restoration of local service providers; at transition: Transition of Coordination/Management, Drawdown, Demobilization

The Recovery Operations Process

At the core of these rising and falling tides of activity is a cyclical operations process that facilitates iterative problem-solving (i.e. the repeated use of a process to incrementally solve problems and improve outcomes). It generally reflects the process depicted here.

The following slides will describe each step in detail, provide additional insight on transition activities, and discuss the federal recovery operations process.

Step 1: Identify Gaps, Needs, and Challenges, Step 2: Identify Stakeholders and Build Coalitions, Step 3: Determine Course of Action and Ensure Adequate Support, Step 4: Implement Course of Action, Step 5: Evaluate Efforts, Step 6: Repeat

Step 1: Identifying Gaps, Needs, and Challenges

Personnel on-site conduct assessments of the physical damage and service disruptions caused by the disaster. Comparison of this data against the community's baseline reveals the disaster's impact.

Data Inputs

  • Physical Damage Data
  • Services Disruption Data
  • Community Baseline
  • Community Development Goals

Analytical Outputs

  • Disaster Impact
  • Resource Gaps and Recovery Needs
  • Challenges
Personnel assessing damage

Essential Elements of Information

Essential Elements of Information (EEIs) are the key pieces of qualitative and quantitative data necessary to develop situational awareness for decision-making. They must be specific and measurable. They should also help highlight recovery issues and barriers to recovery.

Organizations involved in recovery should develop EEIs to support their situational awareness and assessment efforts prior to a disaster occurring.

Community Baseline EEIs (Normative Data)

  • Percentage of individuals with disabilities, under 18, rely on electricity dependent medical equipment, etc.
  • Number of hospitals, dialysis centers, residential long-term care facilities, etc.
  • Percentage of students that have medical necessities provided by school nurses.

Health and Social Services EEIs (Impact Data)

  • Number of health care/social services/child care facilities closed due to power outages, damage, utility issues, etc.
  • Are health care and social service providers experiencing/expecting workforce attrition?
  • Are there any environmental health risks?
  • Are individuals, families, and service providers able to access recovery resources?
Elements of Information, Analysis, Recovery Issues and Barriers

Sample Recovery Issues Monitored with EEIs

Team icon; Public Health – Epidemiological Surveillance, Health Communications, Lab Capacity; Brain icon; Behavioral Health – Mental Health Care Network Capacity, Substance Abuse Access/Risks, Impact of Stressors; City icon; Environmental Health – Water/Air/Soil Quality, Debris Risks, Chemical/Radiological Contamination

Sample Recovery Issues Monitored with EEIs (Continued)

Baby and school icon; Children in Disasters (Schools, Children, and Youth) – Child Care Impacts, School Status/Adaptations, Child Abuse and Neglect, Nutrition Risks; employee badge icon; Referral to Social Services/ Disaster Case Management – Case Management Network, Long-Term Recovery Committees; Users icon; Long-Term Recovery Impacts to First Responders – Exposures to First Responders, Responder Monitoring

Step 2: Identify Stakeholders and Build Coalitions

The multi-disciplinary, and resource intensive, nature of recovery makes effective partnerships critical. The first step in developing effective partnerships is identifying stakeholders. Once stakeholders have been identified, partnerships can be established by formalizing mechanisms for collaboration.

Tips for Identifying Stakeholders

  • Do your research before making contact
  • Go to the stakeholders in person
  • Look for community organizations and leaders
  • Remember that stakeholders are not all local, obvious, or directly visible

Tips for Building Coalitions

  • Be familiar with stakeholder priorities and interests
  • Educate the stakeholders as necessary
  • Establish regular communication
  • Help solve problems and challenges
FEMA employees and stakeholders in a meeting

Step 3: Determine a Course of Action and Ensure Adequate Support

Stakeholders collaborate to develop a course of action for resolving each known issue. This involves defining a desired end state; creating objectives, tasks, and metrics to measure success; as well as identifying necessary resources. Once this is done, stakeholders work together to gather the resources necessary for implementation.

Tips for Developing a Course of Action

  • Integrate input from all stakeholders
  • Be mindful of statutes, regulations, and authorities
  • Develop multiple options to compare and combine
  • Keep it simple
  • Make it measurable

Remember: A successful course of action focuses on an identified issue or barrier, identifies the resource it needs, and facilitates interventions that close the distance between the need and the resource required.

Stakeholders sitting at long table

Step 3: Determine a Course of Action and Ensure Adequate Support (Continued)

Ensuring adequate support for a chosen course of action is critical to successful implementation. Key forms of support include informational, political, and physical resources. Many of these are facilitated or sourced via the HSS RSF.

What kinds of resources are there?

  • Information on recovery resources, deadlines, and requirements
  • Knowledge about how to manage long-term recovery issues
  • Buy-in or formal agreements among affected or implementing stakeholders
  • Funding and people to support repairs, planning, and capability gaps

Tips for ensuring adequate support include

  • Be specific when asking stakeholders to contribute resources
  • Define how much and for how long
  • Align interests with the resources requested
  • Get it in writing
Team icon, brain icon, money icon, playbook icon, checklist icon, and calendar icon

Scaling Courses of Action

Disasters do not impact communities in the same way, and affected communities often have very different capacity issues.

Scaling courses of action based on need is critical for conserving scarce resources and delivering targeted assistance.

As seen in the diagram below, the form and scale of assistance an affected community needs is directly correlated with the community's recovery capacity and the level of impact endured.

Method of providing assistance includes (from left to right) zone 1 (push information), zone 2 (empower intermediaries), zone 3 (peer-to-peer outreach), and zone 4 pointing to a center of a target-shape labeled individual outreach, facilitated assistance; Zone 1 is also labeled Low impact/high capacity, and Zones 2 and 3 are labeled High impact/low capacity; Zone 1: Community has low impact and high recovery compacity. Only broad, system-wide assistance is necessary. It is primarily provided by pushing information via self-help resources; Zone 4: Community has high impact and low recovery capacity. In this case, individual outreach is required in specific locations in order to provide direct assistance in facilitating recovery efforts; Type of assistance to provide (from right to left) system-wide solutions (self-help resources), regionally specific (utilize existing network), issue specific (direct technical assistance, and place based pointing to the center of a target-shape opposite from zone 4; System-wide solutions, regionally specific, and issue specific are also labeled Scale of assistance needed

Steps 4 and 5: Implementation and Evaluation

Course of action implementation varies in form and duration based on the issues addressed. Early on, the focus is on immediate needs. Later, focus shifts to systemic issues that require long-term solutions

Tips for Implementation and Evaluation:

  • Effective project/program management is key
  • Ensure stakeholder integration and ownership
  • Quality metrics and analysis are key to success

Sustaining a Successful Recovery:

  • All recovery is local. Local, state, tribal, and territorial governments are the lead.
  • Federal and non-profit support should always have local ownership to sustain implementation activities over time.

Questions for Evaluation:

  • Is service provision or task completion occurring at a rate that is reasonable and appropriate for the volume of resources being expended on them?
  • Is the desired outcome being achieved through these efforts?
  • How accurately and precisely do the chosen metrics measure achievement of desired outcome?
  • Is the course of action being implemented still the appropriate solution for the issue it was designed to resolve?

Step 6: Repeat

The recovery operations process is iterative by nature. This allows for both constant improvement and adaptation to shifting situations, issues, and needs.

The initial iteration of the operations process is slow and hectic. However, with effective management and coordination, efficiency increases with each iteration and more is accomplished with less management effort.

Course of Action implementation will often continue while the recovery operations process repeats.

Transition generally signals a gradual slowing of the recovery operations process.

Recovery issues (and interventions) are also temporal in nature -- meaning, they will change over time. The severity will shift, those impacted will change, and the corresponding actions needed will need to adapt accordingly. 

FEMA employees at recovery center

Transition Considerations

The transition of renewed and improved Health and Social Services operations back to day-to-day providers is the ultimate functional goal of HSS RSF operations.

Bearing the following points in mind can smooth this process.

  • Transition begins as soon as operations start
  • Incremental transition smooths the process
  • Closely monitor resource availability and needs as draw-down occurs
FEMA employees with packages

Federal HSS RSF Operations

The federal HSS RSF has a defined set of phases for recovery operations. These phases are defined by the development and implementation of specific planning documents. However, each phase is underpinned by the steps of the Recovery Operations Process.

Process chart with three steps – Conduct Mission Scoping Assessment (MSA) (Steps 1 and 2) In partnership with the state, identify and document overarching issues as they relate to health, social services recovery. What are the issues and barriers to recovery?; Develop Recovery Support Strategy (RSS) (Step 3) Document available federal capabilities and the courses of action to be undertaken to support health and social services recovery. What actions will shorten the distance between resource needs and providers?; Implement the RSS (Steps 4, 5, 6, and Transition) Execute RSS, build state and local capabilities, and coordinate the transition to steady-state operations. What needs to be done to prepare local providers to resume service provision?

Federal HSS RSF Operations (Continued)

The federal HSS RSF fills a very specific supporting role in recovery operations. Though it is capable of bringing substantial physical and financial resources to bear, the majority of it involves:

Call center icon; Technical assistance (e.g. Peer-to-peer planning workshops)
Information sharing (e.g. connecting the dots between disparate data sources – providing the state a strategic view across the mission areas)
Leveraging existing resources (e.g. working with federal program staff to retool planned initiatives to also support immediate recovery needs)
Section Summary

Recovery involves multiple waves of activity:

  • Initial Actions: assess disaster impacts, identify stakeholders, and organize recovery efforts
  • Recovery Operations: mobilize resources to resolve recovery issues and help local service providers regain their capabilities.
  • Transition: recovery resources draw-down and demobilize as services and recovery projects are transferred to local providers or completed

Federal HSS Operations are structured around conducting a Mission Scoping Assessment, developing a Recovery Support Strategy (RSS), and implementing the RSS.

The recovery operations process is iterative and involves the following steps:

  1. Identify gaps, needs, and challenges
  2. Identify stakeholders and develop working relationships
  3. Collaborate to determine course of action and gain logistical support
  4. Implement course of action
  5. Evaluate efforts
  6. Repeat
List of sections - Section 1: The HSS Recovery Support Function (checkmark), Section 2: HSS Recovery Coordination (checkmark), Section 3: HSS Recovery Operations (checkmark), Section 4: HSS Recovery in Practice (arrow)