ERHMS

Purpose

Incident Personnel Out-processing Assessment

Out-processing assessments are conducted to documentincident personnelstatus atthe conclusion oftheirresponse 

duties and determine the extent, if any,towhich individualresponders have been adversely affected by theirwork.This 

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

others.

Principles of Out-processing Assessment

• Overseen by the personmanaging the safety of personnel during an incident

• All incident personnelshould receive an out-processing assessment as part ofthe 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 toGatherDuringOut-processing 

Assessment

Personal information

• Verifyidentifyingandcontactinformation.

o Ex: Name, address, response organization.

• Verify usual work.

o Ex: Industry, occupation, job tasks.

• Verify special needs.

o Ex: Primary language. 

Response-related information

• Response/recovery work.

o Ex: Circumstances under which response work was performed.

• Knownhazardousexposuresor conditions.

Face-to-face out-processing of anemergencymedicalservices 

provider

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

• Qualitative questions.

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

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

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

Management of Out-processing Assessment

Analyzing, interpreting, and reporting results of incident personnel outprocessing

• 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 ResponderHealth Monitoring and Surveillance (ERHMS)systemis a healthmonitoring and surveillance 

framework thatincludesrecommendations and toolsspecific to protect emergency responders during the pre-deployment, deployment, and post-deployment phases of adisaster.The intent of ERHMS isto identify exposures and/orsigns 

and symptoms early in the course of an emergency response in orderto prevent ormitigate adverse physical and psychological outcomes and ensure workersmaintain their ability to respond effectively and are not harmed in the course ofthis 

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

medicalreferral andpossible enrollmentina long-termhealthsurveillanceprogram.Please referto Chapter9 andsection 

9TformoreinformationonIncidentPersonnelOut-processingAssessment.

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

erhmsonline@cdc.gov

For more information on ERHMS, please visit: 

www.cdc.gov/niosh/erhms