ERHMS

Purpose

Health and Safety Training

Health and safety training is critical for the preparedness of emergency responders. The responders are required to be fully 

certified to perform duty-specific tasks, which may have federal, state or local training requirements. The Emergency Responder Health Monitoring and Surveillance (ERHMS) system could capture what training arriving responders have when 

reporting to the disaster and document its effectiveness to the response and afterward.

Principles of Health and Safety Training

• The pre-deploymenttraining thatresponders need largely depends on their previoustraining and experience as 

well asthe nature ofthe work they will be doing.

• The site-specific training thatmany responderswillrequire involvesmore extensive training based on the nature 

oftheir anticipatedwork and any individualrisk factorsidentified in the core screening process.

Health and Safety Training Data: Action Items

• Respondertraining data should be collected at all phases of an incident.

• The authority who has jurisdiction for the responder should have documentation of certification and refresher 

training per local, state, and federal requirements.

• Training data should be collected andmaintained through a designated office and be available to other 

components ofthe Incident Command Systemduring the rostering process.

• Data collected should include alltraining completed to support certification.

• An out-processing assessmentshould be performed to ensure thatidentified training gaps are resolved priorto 

thenextdeployment.
ERHMS

Propertraining and documentation strengthensresponderreadiness and safety.Belowis an example of atable used to 

record trainings.

Responder Training Documentation form

Category Topic Training Received?

SAFETY AWARENESS

Driving Hazard Awareness

Environmental Conditions

Personal Protective Equipment

Disaster Zone Safety

COMMUNICATIONS

Hazard Communications

Incident Action Plan

Health and Safety Plan

Standard Operating Guide/Procedure

Situation Reports

Mobile Communications

SELF CARE/BUDDY CARE

Physical

Emotional

Medical

Work schedule

ORGANIZATION Incident Command System

NationalIncidentManagementSystem

DECONTAMINATION

Chemical/Biological decontamination

Gross decontamination

Equipment decontamination

SITE OPERATIONS

Site Control

Credentialing

Accountability

DISASTER CHARACTERIZATION Specific Disaster Types

Emergency Responder Health Monitoring and Surveillance

The ERHMS systemis a healthmonitoring and surveillance framework thatincludesrecommendations and toolsspecific 

to protect emergency responders during the pre-deployment, deployment, and post-deployment phases of a disaster. 

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 ensureworkersmaintain their ability to

respond effectively and are not harmed in the course of this response work. Data will also help to identify during the postdeployment phase which responders would benefit from medical referral and possible enrollment in a long-term health 

surveillance program. Please refer to Chapter 3 and section 3T for more information on Health and Safety Training.

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