The Incident Management System in Ontario

While the session was entitled, "From SARS to H1N1: What Have We Learned – A Discussion on How the Ontario Health Care and Public Health Systems can Benefit from the Continued Development of the Incident-Management System (IMS)," it might have been more appropriately renamed: "IMS and Ontario: a happy, well-considered marriage for emergency management."

To read about the Incident Management System in Ontario, please click here.

And why do Ontarians need IMS? Because we've learned from past public health events, from the ice storm in '98, to the 2003 SARS outbreaks, to the H1N1 flu virus. In Ontario, we've had very high profile public concerns, balanced with a low tolerance for failure and no province wide IMS.

Ontario's IMS respects existing structures in Ontario, Ontario’s stakeholder groups and takes advantage of the strengths of existing emergency management systems in Ontario.

According to presenter Dr. Brian Schwartz, the basics of IMS outline the following:
1. Who is in charge 2. How do you communicate and 3. How do you scale up and down?

Looking forward, Schwartz said, "We are building an evidenciary-based model for emergency management. We continue to improve the model. We need to be in partnership with local public health units, and we have to adopt the IMS structure to our own areas of public health."