Having an emergency response team at your place of work or business is an essential safety measure. It boils down to having an internal team of trained volunteer employees that can provide an urgent, efficient, and measured response to emergency situations before public emergency services can arrive on the scene.
These emergency situations may include a fire, a chemical spill, a workplace accident causing grievous injury to one or more employees, a sudden outbreak of critical illnesses resulting in death, a natural disaster, and many others. Without an emergency response team, a company will find itself incurring both heavy property damage and a higher casualty count, should such an emergency occur within their building or premises.
However, to say that this is the only role of an emergency response team is incorrect. They have other roles and responsibilities that they must see to in the fulfilment of their duties. The complete breakdown of the roles of an efficient emergency response team at work is as follows:
- Intervention and stabilisation. The emergency response team’s main rationale is to intervene and stabilise an emergency situation before they can get out of control. Examples of this include extinguishing minor fires before they become bigger, administering first aid or medicine before an injury or condition becomes fatal, etc.
- Assist with compliance. The emergency response team is tasked to help the company comply with regulatory requirements according to New Zealand workplace safety laws. This can range from ensuring that everyone uses the right safety workwear for their job to training employees about what to do during emergency situations.
- Prevent or minimise bad publicity. An emergency response team should be able to help the company minimise the potential negative consequences of having an emergency within business premises. This may include helping in-house PR release statements that are factual and accurate, as well as being sensitive to those who have been personally affected by the emergency.
- Employee support. The emergency response team should be able to demonstrate to the employees, through their competence and up-to-date equipment, that management is concerned for their safety and welfare.
- Reduce environmental impact. Another role of the emergency response team is to help the company reduce its detrimental impact to the environment. This can be done by suggesting and organising greener practices, as well as ensuring that hazardous wastes are properly disposed of.
- Minimise property loss and damage. After ensuring the safe and prompt evacuation of employees from the workplace premises, the emergency response team also has the role of reducing the damage to the company’s property. This may include hauling important documents out of an office, ensuring a complete lockdown of the property to prevent theft, etc.
- Provide emergency response in times of disaster. In the event of natural disasters where public emergency services are unable to respond or reach the company premises, the emergency response team is tasked to provide the assistance needed by performing everything that needs to be done in place of emergency services. This can range from first aid and evacuation to search and rescue.
Having an emergency response team at work is not the same as having paramedics or medical staff within the office premises at all times. Rather, its function is to have a trained and well-equipped team of volunteer employees who are so intimately familiar with the hazards and dangers of the workplace that they know how to provide an efficient response should any emergency occur. The fact that they should be able to perform all the essential roles listed above is proof that they are an essential need in running a business, especially in hazardous or heavy industries.
