Introduction
Volunteers are ordinary people who are present at the scene of an emergency and want to help. First responders often need others to help manage, observe, or speak with those affected by the mass incident. However, as volunteers are not trained, working with them may be difficult in stressful circumstances. For this reason, there exist many challenges in coordinating non-professional assistants, and emergency responders can use special strategies to manage volunteers.
Challenges in Volunteer Collaboration
Volunteer Classification
One challenge in working with volunteers is determining who can or cannot help in an emergency. Responders may struggle to identify individuals with the required knowledge and engage them. According to the article by Sher et al. (2019), some people may be present at the site but be unwilling to help. These individuals can be classified as bystanders, and their presence may even cause problems for volunteers and professionals.
Others can take the initiative and offer their support upon interacting with responders – Sher et al. (2019) call them spontaneous volunteers (SV). They can mobilize themselves and often have the skills necessary for the specific incident. For instance, nurses and other healthcare professionals may be among the residents in the affected area. Another group is willing volunteers (WV), who may assist responders if asked. The typology of volunteers described in the article is a critical component of management because it helps professionals engage SVs and encourage WV while controlling bystander behavior.
Volunteer Management
Another issue identified in the paper is the process of volunteer management. As these individuals lack emergency training, they may not know how to respond. To resolve this issue, Sher et al. (2019) suggest introducing the SCAN model: safety, call for assistance, assign tasks, and network.
Each step in this process describes how responders can interact with volunteers and engage them appropriately. For instance, experts can begin by assessing whether it is safe for volunteers to enter the affected zone. The second step is to talk to the individuals present and to find suitable volunteers. Then, these persons can be assigned their duties, and professionals can communicate with them to manage the situation.
The article also demonstrates that proper volunteer triage is a challenge in managing non-professionals. The team of first responders includes highly skilled experts, but the volunteers’ levels of knowledge and types are unknown. Therefore, it is difficult to see which tasks to assign to each willing participant.
Sher et al. (2019) implement another key component of management – volunteer triage. This is the process of determining where each volunteer belongs. For example, experts can ask people whether they have medical training and separate those who can help administer first aid. Individuals without these skills are assigned tasks based on the needs of the community affected by the crisis. As a result, volunteer tasks are assigned based on their abilities.
Conclusion
Overall, volunteers can significantly affect the outcome of an emergency by taking on many tasks and reducing the workload of first responders. Their performance depends on expert volunteer management – professionals arriving at the scene should adequately assess the current bystanders and identify who can help. The challenges in coordinating volunteers include selecting and encouraging the right individuals, determining the best way to communicate with them, and analyzing their skills. The management components introduced in the article are the volunteer typology, the SCAN method, and volunteer triage.
Reference
Sher, A. M., Kent, M. R., Lyver, M., Vogt, A., Fox, T., Schreiber, S., Newbury, B., & Al Mulhim, M. (2019). Leveraging volunteers during emergent events. JEMS.