NVERS Weekly Update, January 13-17

This week at NVERS the Northern Virginia Fire Chiefs held their monthly meeting at the Fairlington Community Center, directly following the Senior Leaders Workshop. During this meeting the Fire Chiefs were briefed by various partner agencies, including NVERS and the Senior Operations Board. The Fire Chiefs praised the accomplishments of the Technical Writing Group and Operations Board in 2013, and are looking forward to additional procedural and technical manuals being completed in 2014. The Fire Chiefs were also briefed on the successes and lessons learned from the 2013 Leadership Development Institute (LDI), and discussed potential changes to improve the LDI in 2014.

Fire/EMS and Law Enforcement representatives from Northern
Virginia also met this week to discuss each jurisdiction's current status of their Rescue Taskforce (RTF) program. The group also shared their program's end goal, challenges they've faced and lessons learned. For those agencies with established or programs in development, similar challenges were felt amongst them. Agencies interested in a program, but that have not yet established one, came away with many considerations. The group will continue to meet throughout 2014 to learn more from each other and to regionally build out RTF programs.

For patient tracking, NVERS has submitted the purchase order for the next phase of hardware and software for this critical effort. This purchase order will add 510 patient trackers across the jurisdictions of northern Virginia. These devices will be utilizing the latest patient tracking technology available--an HC Standard iOS application running on iPad Air and iPad Minis. Once received, these devices will be distributed and placed on the following apparatus: ALS/ BLS transport units, EMS, Chase vehicles, MCSU, MABs, Engines, Trucks and Rescues, Management and Special services.

This week at the National Capital Region Emergency Management / R-ESF 5 Committee meeting, there was consensus that the National Capital Region Emergency Response System (NCR ERS) efforts of Northern Virginia, Maryland, and the District should start reporting to this committee while maintaining coordination with the health and medical regional programmatic working group. This represents a very supporting step from the NCR policy level in the mission and initiatives of the emergency response system efforts in support of the Region.