ERHMS

Incident Personnel Out-processing Assessment

Purpose

Out-processing assessments are conducted to document incident personnel status at the conclusion of their response 

duties and determine the extent, if any, to which individual responders have been adversely affected by their work. This 

will enable one to identify health trends within the population of workers and help assess and identify potential risks to 

others.

Principles of Out-processing Assessment

• Overseen by the person managing the safety of personnel during an incident

• All incident personnel should receive an out-processing assessment as part of the demobilization process.

• Ideally, the out-processing assessment would be a face-to-face interview in the field as incident personnel are 

preparing to depart back to their routine duty station.

Suggested Information to Gather During Out-processing 

Assessment

Personal information

• Verify identifying and contact information.

 Ex: Name, address, response organization.

• Verify usual work.

 Ex: Industry, occupation, job tasks.

• Verify special needs.

 Ex: Primary language.

Response-related information

• Response/recovery work.

 Ex: Circumstances under which response work was performed.

• Known hazardous exposures or conditions.

 Ex: Measures used by incident personnel to protect themselves from dangers of any kind.

• Qualitative questions.

 Ex: What were the most difficult aspect of this deployment for you?

• Injuries sustained or illness symptoms experienced during response/recovery work.

 Ex: Injuries – description of injury; complete resolution or still present.

Face-to-face out-processing of an emergency medical services 

provider
ERHMS

Management of Out-processing Assessment

• Have clearly stated objectives.

• Make sure there is adequate funding and personnel to 

facilitate the analysis, interpretation, and reporting of 

results.

• Policies and procedures for the monitoring of privacy, 

confidentiality, and data security should be established 

beforehand. 

• In the interest of the workers, data collection should be 

done during or as close as possible to demobilization or 

as soon as possible after demobilization, and the data 

collection location should be convenient for the workers to 

access. 

• Provisions should be made for prompt and effective 

referral for more definitive evaluation and possible 

treatment of workers identified with emergent problems

Emergency Responder Health Monitoring and Surveillance

The Emergency Responder Health Monitoring and Surveillance (ERHMS) system is a health monitoring and surveillance 

framework that includes recommendations and tools specific to protect emergency responders during the pre-deployment, deployment, and post-deployment phases of a disaster. The intent of ERHMS is to identify exposures and/or signs 

and symptoms early in the course of an emergency response in order to prevent or mitigate adverse physical and psychological outcomes and ensure workers maintain their ability to respond effectively and are not harmed in the course of this 

response work. Data will also help to identify during the post-deployment phase which responders would benefit from 

medical referral and possible enrollment in a long-term health surveillance program. Please refer to Chapter 9 and section 

9T for more information on Incident Personnel Out-processing Assessment.

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) ERHMS Contact:

! CDR Renée Funk, Coordinator, ERHMS at rfunk@cdc.gov or 404-498-1376

For more information on ERHMS, please visit: 

erhms.nrt.org & www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/erhms

Analyzing, interpreting, and reporting results of incident personnel outprocessing