Chapter 7 - Personnel

Summary

The “Personnel” chapter deals with professions, potential population sources, operational needs in specific scenarios, and adjustments to the personnel packages, readiness and preparedness, and mobilization. It contains a discussion on the differences between operations in a field hospital to that of a regular “brick and mortar” hospital, as well as the different aspects of health-care operations in various disaster situations and varied cultural environments. It contains a discussion on the importance of “tailor force packaging,” as well as the role of deliberate and adaptive planning. The chapter includes sections on personnel planning, sourcing of personnel, guidance on force health protection initiatives to ensure the safety and health of deployable personnel, an overview of a notional personnel package, which describes a required mix of clinical and nonclinical personnel, “planning pearls” gleaned from recent operational experiences with field hospitals, and – finally – some thoughts on ad hoc team-building initiatives for successfully coalescing personnel to meet mission requirements. Its conclusion infers that there are several reasons for believing that we will continue to see an increase in the frequency, scope, and scale of disasters, making guidance on formulating adequate personnel staffing packages for field hospitals all the more important in the modern era.