Launch of online modules for the Pacific Incident Management Systems (PacIMS) Awareness Course

Suva | 3 November 2020 | 

Dr Andrew Jones

Remarks by Dr Andrew Jones, Director of SPC's Geoscience, Energy and Maritime (GEM) division.

I am pleased to welcome you to the launch of online modules for the Pacific Incident Management Systems (also known as PacIMS) Awareness Course.

Today’s launch is a critical step forward in our commitment here at SPC to better support our members in responding to the challenges and threats our region faces. Climate change and disaster risk, which you all know too well, is our greatest existential threat. Our capacity to prepare for, respond from and to build back better after these disasters and shocks is core to our future and our future resilience and today’s launch will genuinely help drive this forward.

The Pacific Incident Management System or PAC-I-M-S Training Package is Pacific-owned, Pacific-relevant and Pacific-led with many years, consultations, trainings and passionate disaster and emergency service personnel being involved in getting us to where we are today. For this we are privileged to be a part of this network.

Capacity building initiatives, peer-to-peer country support and other trainings in the disaster risk management sector is core to SPC’s role. 

Between July 2018 and June 2019, SPC delivered a total of 478 capacity building trainings and workshops to a total of just over 4,500 participants.

Since the turn of the year, the effects of COVID-19 has drastically reduced and disrupted SPC’s ability to run these mostly face-to-face trainings alongside our members however disasters like Cyclone Harold don’t wait for COVID-19 to stop so it’s critical we maintain this work in a post-pandemic world.

In response, SPC has been implementing the Distance Training and Evaluation Project since June 2020, also known as Learning Management System (LMS) which allows participants to undertake online, self-paced learning relevant to the work we do across our region.

Our team have pulled together the decades of experience along with recent competency-based reviews on the training and capacity needs of our Members in this sector and developed a fully self-paced, online training package for the Pacific Incident Management System (Pac-IMS).  This training package uses real-life scenarios from our region including cyclones, floods, boat disasters and other relevant events that are intrinsically linked to our work.

It has been developed by you and your experiences in this sector and is focused on improving coordination across emergency responders towards a safer and more resilient Pacific region.

The next steps are to provide access to the self-paced modules which also allows non-traditional emergency responders such as community representatives or non-government agencies to also easily access and learn from the modules.

This PacIMS is the first of its kind for us here at SPC and I would like to thank those of you involved as well as the Pacific Islands Emergency Management Alliance for your foresight and drive towards ensuring we can continue to support our Members throughout the pandemic in this way.

This is first but it will not be the last as we look forward to creating more online modules and launching these in the coming months.

With that, it gives me great pleasure to officially launch the PacIMS Awareness Course

I encourage your agencies to use this online version of PacIMS to help improve the understanding of incident management systems.

We are all in this together as we navigate the post-pandemic world so if you have any questions or issues please reach out to our PIEMA or SPC team and we will be happy to assist.

Thank you again for taking time out from your busy schedules to participate in this important event.

Vinaka vakalevu.

Country
Fiji