In an attempt to help policy makers everywhere prevent allowing the same mistakes to be made on the next major event anywhere in the world, I propose the collective of minds online participate in developing this best practices pre-event After Action Report. Its role is for use in developing pre-event policy to ensure each item has a mitigation strategy attached to it.  If an employee points out a problem to their employer, a connection with liability in not addressing the problem is a potential outcome. This could put the employee in a bad position with their employer, or result in a suggestion to not raise the issue. By developing a consensus standard among Emergency Management and Public Safety professional represented by LinkedIn users, the employee may be offered a safety valve in pointing out issues and referring to what appears to be consensus standards among the industry.

The upside of developing this pre-event After Action Report is it will at least reduce the cost of developing After Action reports for agencies, communities, regions and others worldwide if they chose not to implement policy actions to mitigate the repetitive mistakes pointed out in the document, as many findings drafted pre-event will be applicable.

Below are examples and I encourage others to add to this list so perhaps collectively we can reduce preventable morbidity and mortality through this initiative.

After Action Findings for [insert name of your community]:

The agencies did not initially operate from a Unified Command Post or in a coordinated manner but managed their operations from separate Command Posts (CPs). It would have been helpful if policy with clear triggers to establish Unified Command had been developed, adopted and trained on in a region-wide basis so early implementation of a true Unified Command operation could be managed.

Not all responding and supporting agencies were familiar with the Incident Management System (IMS) that was supposed to be utilized and therefore operated independently, which created unnecessary duplication of effort in some cases and delayed or lack of response in other areas. It would be helpful if policy to ensure all primary and support agencies had been trained on the adopted IMS on a region-wide basis and required to utilize it.