Step 1: Offer Staff Professional Development

Give an orientation to staff who are assigned to emergency roles. Review your program’s disaster preparedness and response procedures with all staff to improve your program’s emergency response capacity. Create an ongoing professional development schedule that considers staff turnover and includes training for new staff in the emergency preparedness plan and procedures. Make sure all staff know how to use emergency safety equipment.

Tabletop Exercises

A tabletop exercise is a group discussion where staff read emergency scenarios and talk about how they would respond. This exercise helps staff assigned to emergency roles understand their responsibilities and how to work as a team. Staff can ask questions, and teams can walk though their steps to understand what they need to do. The exercises can also help teams find areas for improvement in their plans.

Emergencies are unpredictable, but a tabletop exercise can help staff feel more confident about what to do in a real emergency. See the Guide to Tabletop Exercises for more information.

Tips for doing tabletop exercises:

• Use tabletop exercises to help staff learn more about their roles and how to respond to specific emergencies.
• Review what worked well and write a plan for how to address anything that didn’t go well.
• Use your mental health consultant to help staff practice how to respond to mental health issues.

Last Updated: June 13, 2025