PARATUS provides diverse services tailored to each client’s mandate, needs and level of knowledge and readiness. Extensive assessment, risk management and due diligence are found in all PARATUS services.

PARATUS can provide you with continued support, but our ultimate goal is strengthen your organization so that you will no longer require our services.

Emergency Plan development or review
An effective, comprehensive emergency plan is crucial to the success of every business. Unfortunately, this function is often overlooked, put aside for more immediate concerns, or hastily done. And often, once plans are developed, they then sit on a shelf gathering dust until needed – and by then, the plan is often outdated and ineffective.

The PARATUS Group can help you develop an all-hazards plan, or a plan for specific hazards that could threaten your organization or community. Plans generally consist of a standardized set of information organized into a logical scheme that clearly defines the actions required, the persons assigned to perform those actions and the individuals responsible for the implementation and maintenance of the various aspects of the plan.

Emergency Plans are "site specific" and they must be written to address the issues that are encountered in each jurisdiction, and the structure of each organization. 

Disaster Assessment
The PARATUS Group can help you develop standardized systems and processes to determine immediate disaster needs and the extent or magnitude of a disaster.

This service provides: A plan, procedures and system design that will enable local authorities to implement a comprehensive damage assessment process to meet local emergency response needs. This will ensure:

• Priorities and the need for outside assistance are quickly established.
• Response and recovery activities are driven by the same assessment procedures at all levels.
• Community preparedness activities for recovery are focused, and during response are consistent with needs, programs at state and federal levels. 

Operational / After-Action Debriefing and "Lessons-Learned" reports
After an emergency response, most people just want to get back to business. However, a facilitated discussion enables the individuals involved to learn for themselves what happened, why it happened, what went well, what needs improvement and what lessons can be learned from the experience. The spirit is one of openness and learning – not griping or allocating blame. This is a crucial part of ensuring emergency plans are continuously improved.

Recovery Operations
Organizations and governments at all levels have plans for the preparation, mitigation & response phases of a disaster, but few have plans in place for recovery. This is the weak link in the disaster management spectrum. PARATUS Group has experience and expertise in recovery phase of large-scale disasters, and can help clients take the lead and set the standard in developing realistic, mature plans for this difficult phase. 

Staff and/or Volunteer (Human Resource) Management
PARATUS can assist you in developing procedures to:

• communicate the emergency plan effectively to all employees
• develop an emergency action plan as an important part of your corporate safety program
• create a critical-incident manual for Human Resources and develop an HR Contingency Plan
• design and conduct team-building training as a key to emergency preparedness
• partner with facilities managers, systems experts and financial officers to create a security team
• understand the legal ramifications for elements of an emergency response plan
• conduct an HR risk assessment to determine your organization's vulnerability to security threats.

Risk/Hazard Evaluation and Assessment
The PARATUS Group can assist you in identifying and ranking current natural and technological hazards, assessing the risks those hazards pose, and developing an inventory of public and private response capabilities. This will help you apply scarce resources in a logical and business-minded approach.

PARATUS provides quantitative risk assessments, and expresses the potential for threat, impact, and risk in terms of a numeric value. The major advantage of the quantitative approach is that it is precise and provides a measurement that can be fed directly into a cost-benefit analysis.  

Exercising Services
Exercises should be organized to increase in complexity - for example, from tabletop discussions to functional exercises to a full-scale exercise. Each type of exercise builds on previous exercises using more sophisticated simulation techniques and requiring more preparation time, personnel, and planning. Rushing into a complex exercise too quickly can open the door to potential failure because shortfalls have not been identified through less complicated and less expensive exercises.

The PARATUS Group can develop, conduct and evaluate each type of exercise or work with you to build your internal capacity to do this work yourself so that you to assess your own readiness and response ability.

Contact

PARATUS Group

Steve Armstrong, Principal

Telephone: (403) 236-0205 Ext: 2

Email: mailto:steve_armstrong@paratusgroup.ca