The weaving of NIMS and HICS for hospital emergency planners

If you follow the trail of the various and sundry presidential directives regarding emergency management training, the ultimate goal of the educational initiative is for each healthcare worker to have received at least the basics in incident command knowledge, with the focus being the National Incident Management System (NIMS).

The Hospital Emergency Incident Command System (HEICS) program was already in development in California in 2002 as a means of coordinating hospitals, as they provided the most significant support to first responders.

The fourth iteration of HEICS (originally known as HEICS IV) was in the planning stages when the presidential directive (I’m not real tight on the numbers of the various directives, just the content) was issued relative to the requirement to adopt a NIMS-compliant incident command structure. So HEICS IV morphed into HICS (Hospital Incident Command System), which is designed as a NIMS-compliant incident command structure.

Thus, providing HICS training results in compliance with the federal mandates. From a healthcare perspective, the federal mandates and what is practical from an operational standpoint match up completely (or pretty close to it — unlike The Joint Commission’s standards, which are, in my mind, unnecessarily prescriptive and not particularly useful as a function of NIMS compliance, but I digress).