Is there a required composition of the Emergency Management Committee?

The Joint Commission has no prescribed list of recommended members for the emergency management committee. The organization should consider positions or persons that have primary responsibility and expertise associated with the phases of emergency management, as well as anyone who would have responsibilities in incident command for the organization. This includes mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery activities.

For example, if the National Incident Management System (NIMS) is used, there should be representation at least from the areas of command, command staff, operations, planning, logistics, and finance/administration. Membership consideration could come from on-call lists, such as emergency medicine on-call, administrator on-call, house supervisor on-call, medical staff on-call and physical plant content experts on-call.   

Just like the hazard vulnerability analysis (HVA) is used to establish the content of an emergency operations plan, the HVA can also be used to establish the expertise needed for the emergency management committee. Also, if the community emergency operations structure requires certain representation in an emergency management committee, then the organization should take that into consideration when setting up committee representation. 

EM.10.01.01 requires senior leaders to participate in emergency management planning activities.  Although it is up to the hospital to determine committee participants, the committee should be a multidisciplinary team which may include representatives from senior leadership, nursing services, medical staff, pharmacy services, infection prevention and control, facilities engineering, security and information technology.  There are specific activities required of the committee (see EM.10.01.01, EP 4).

Reference EM.10.01.01