Emergency Response Drills
December 08th, 2011
A Vital Component in your Training Plan
Rich Bricker
Facilities Coordinator – RecSports
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
At the University of Tennessee RecSports department the Facilities and Aquatics program areas are involved in running drills on their staff. As a result of a fatal cardiac arrest in 2007 and a near drowning in 2009 both of these program areas decided to add more hands-on training to the current emergency response plan in the form of drills. For the purposes of UT RecSports, a drill is a scenario in which student workers are placed in a false crisis in order to practice emergency response procedures. These situations take place in various locations throughout all RecSports facilities.
The following article contains two parts: practical drills and research. The first section deals with our drill program, and the article explains the approach that the University of Tennessee RecSports program takes to ensure that our manager level staff has practical experience in dealing with emergency situations. By using a drill scenario, we believe that we are getting as close to a “real life” crisis as possible. In the second section, the article explains some of the research that was performed using the RecSports Facilities managers. We wanted to determine if running drills affected the self-reported level of confidence that the managers felt when dealing with emergency situations.