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Signed electronically summer camp emergency contact

Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar "Demonstrating your commitment to participant safety." Thank you for taking time out of your day to join us - my name is Michelle Chopin and I'll be your host this morning or this afternoon depending on where you are listening from. With Spring Break just around the corner, recreation organizations everywhere are preparing for their spring and summer camps. Besides the obvious tasks, you and your staff are responsible for providing a safe and secure environment for campers of all ages who are participating in a wide variety of activities and also possibly in multiple locations. As we get started today I want to tell you a little bit about ePACT Network. ePACT is an online emergency network, that's free for families and individuals and it provides them with a single emergency record to safely and securely store key health information as well as emergency contact details online. This record can be shared with organizations for example like parks and recreation departments that use the system to collect and manage information previously collected on paper - things like medical information, waivers, and consents. I'd like to take this time to introduce my co-host today Matt Webb who is ePACT's Director of Sales and Channel Development. As Michelle mentioned my name is Matt Webb and I've been at ePACT for three years and I oversee our direct sales and channel management team. A fun and very random fact about myself - I've owned a total of seven cars in my adult life and it's not because I break them I like to just chalk it up to bad luck. Nice! Well you guys have almost met me - my name is Michelle and I'm the Marketing Manager here at ePACT. I joined the team in 2016 and I absolutely love being able to provide our users with great content to help them learn more about emergency preparedness and safety in every aspect of their lives. Following on from Matt, my fun fact - some of you may have noticed my last name which is my little claim to fame. I am related to the composer, Frederic Chopin, and have played the piano since I was eight years old and I actually also still have my very first piano at home. If you're on a social today you're welcome to chat with me on ePACT Network and join in the conversation there. If at any point you want to chat with Matt you can reach him his email address is on the screen for you all now. A couple of things before we get started - some housekeeping items - this webinar is being recorded and will be sent to everyone following today's session so you don't need to worry about taking notes or anything like that. The audio for this webinar should be coming through your computer or your laptop speakers. If you have a question, a comment, or a suggestion be sure to use the chat in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen and we'll definitely be answering questions at the end - we've set aside some time for that. If you're posting to social as mentioned definitely use our handle, ePACT Network and then be sure to use our hashtag #RecSafety, which is also on the screen. And of course we would absolutely love your feedback following today's webinar so once the webinar is done you'll see a short survey will pop up on your screen and we only ask you to take a couple of moments to fill out those questions and that helps us to continue bringing you with relevant and interesting content for you in the future. A couple of key takeaways that we hope everyone will walk away with today are best practices to keep safety top of mind - participant safety is important to your organization whether you're hosting camps, managing rec programs, or providing childcare services so keeping those best practices top of mind can give you a benchmark as to what it is that you're doing. We're also going to uncover some challenges and concerns that are common to recreation organizations when it comes to safety. Let's get started - every organization has its own way of ensuring safety for participants so we've put together some general best practices to consider as you prepare for spring and summer camp season and if you have any suggestions or comments as to how you're managing your safety at your organization definitely share with us in the chat - we'd love to hear them. Our first best practice is being prepared for any activity - within that you're going to want to identify the safety requirements that are unique to each program. For example, if your camps are going out on field trips, make sure you have access to crucial medical and contact information; make sure you have additional medication, for example, auto-injectors like EpiPens or other health equipment before leaving so then you're fully prepared once you're away from the main camp area. If, for example, you're going out on a hike knowing where you're going is obviously going to be the top of your list but also giving an idea of your return time with the main camp and other staff. Take necessary gear with you - for example, a compass food food and water, and a simplified first aid kit (remember this has to be portable if you're hiking) and also you want to make sure that campers are wearing proper equipment, so the right footwear for long walks and maybe a light jacket, for example, in case the weather changes. Next is ensuring that your staff is certified for each activity that they're responsible for. If you have an aquatics program of any kind, lifeguarding certification (and those differ according to region and country) or something like small craft safety and that's applicable if you're using canoes or kayaks within any of your programs. Something like archery, for example, there is actually a proper certification program through USA Archery. Having those items mean that each staff member is highly certified and qualified to manage each individual program or activity that they're responsible for. Providing the necessary safety equipment. First aid kits are obviously going to be a must at all times for those bumps and bruises or scrapes, things like medication for children that might require them, emergency kits, and then things like appropriate attire. For example, if you're doing an obstacle course, make sure that campers are wearing a helmet; if they're doing something that requires eye protection, make sure that they have those available too, and then any other safety gear as well. If you're using third parties for any of these activities, you're going to want to make sure that any waivers that are required are completed by families before the camp or program get started. Our next point is collecting and managing the right information. One of the core pieces about registration when it comes to family signing up for your programs or camps, is collecting emergency contact information - who to contact when there's an emergency of any kind and this also includes pick up detail which is who can, and who cannot, pick up a child in the event of an emergency. Also allergy and dietary information - with children being exposed to the outdoor environment, allergies that are often well-managed at home can become a concern at camp or during a program so it's really important to collect as much information about the types of allergies, the severity of those allergies, and also treatment specific to those allergies from parents prior to camp, and making sure that you have the necessary equipment or medication available to treat a reaction in the event that it occurs. Examples are extra EpiPens, or specific medications. When it comes to food allergies or dietary requirements, having that information upfront helps you prepare food appropriately or allows you to take measures to separate children so that they can avoid cross-contamination with other campers or with specific food items as well. And then special accommodations - for children that require specialized care it's really important for Adaptive Rec or Special Rec staff to have as much information as possible so that they can prepare their programs and also help everyone safely participate in activities during that program. It may actually also be helpful to collect other information such as phobias or behavioral issues so that camp staff can have a more complete understanding of a child's needs and that way they can continue to provide the necessary support throughout the program. Matt: And I'll just add to that as well because, in my experience, I often come across registration forms that will ask for this information but in a very basic manner. An example might be just asking that question - does your child have any medical concerns that we need to be aware of? The challenge of that is parents are very busy and without asking them specifically about allergies, dietary requirements, all that information that Michelle was just talking about, they may not think to note that information down on your registration form and in our experience asking those more detailed questions has also prompted parents to provide you guys with the right information. That's awesome, Matt, thanks! Moving on to the next point is identifying a safety point person. The idea here is that you're going to appoint of staff member as your key safety expert. They're going to create a culture of safety overall and act as a safety role model for camp and program participants and actually also to other staff as well. From the organization's perspective helping them become and remain a subject matter expert can really help them take on this role as effectively as possible. Your safety experts should focus on key areas like kitchen and food services and that goes back to helping with any food allergies, dietary requirements, or restrictions; things like health and sanitation; emergency preparation and management, whether that's preparing for regional potential natural disasters or various scenarios such as medical emergencies, allergic reactions etc. Transportation and travel supervision - going back to field trips. When you're taking participants off-site you want to make sure that they're traveling safely and that they're all accounted for at all times and that they know how that process works. And then of course any potential safety issues as you add new programs and new activities into your organization - being aware of what could happen and then preparing accordingly. Also let other staff know that this individual is the single point of contact or resource for any safety related questions, any concerns they might have if they're unsure about something, and also ideas for doing things safer or better or improving a particular process. You might also want to consider helping your safety persons get certified, for example, becoming a certified safety professional is a proper designation that you can get throughout the United States. Moving on - you're going to want to make or review your emergency plan so if you have an emergency plan, regularly reviewing it, keeping it up-to-date is really important; if you've yet to create one, making an emergency plan should be priority prior to starting any of your programs. As with anything, making sure that you have emergency and medical information for each participant or camper right there in that emergency plan is going to be really important and making sure it's easily accessible. For example using a tool like ePACT is great because with our Admin App you can access records for every participant within that particular activity or camp whether you have a data or cellular connection or not. That means that you can access that information quickly whenever you need it. However, we understand that not every camp staff member will have access to a smartphone so you want to have another electronic version, perhaps stored on a USB, perhaps use on a laptop that you have to hand or paper backup just in case. Some key pieces to your emergency plan to consider would be to include things like knowing who to reach in different scenarios, whether it's a medical emergency versus a natural disaster versus extreme weather; things like evacuation plans - knowing how you are going to be leaving a particular area or region, routes to the nearest medical center if going back to the camp medical center is not an option; designated meeting spaces; and also risks in the region that your camp or program is taking place - whether that's areas prone to earthquakes or tornadoes, extreme weather, etc. You will also want to have a way to quickly communicate with parents, guardians, and or emergency contacts. If you rely on phone calls, you could have to call several people for each camper before reaching someone so this is a really good example of a reason why you should test your emergency and communications plan regularly. That helps you identify gaps and then you can refine it by finding solutions before you have to use it in an actual emergency. And then of course practice! We recommend practicing at least once before summer camps or programs start and you might want to consider trying or testing different scenarios such as an injury or an incoming hurricane so that you have all possible scenarios planned out ahead of time. Matt: I'll add to that because collecting emergency contact information is critical regardless of which type of recreation program that you might be operating - one thing that i always suggest is ensure that emergency contacts are somehow notified when they're listed as an emergency contact for someone, because what can happen here is that an aunt or an uncle is listed as an emergency contact, they're not told during emergency contact and suddenly that person is out of the country for the duration of, say, a summer camp when they could be contacted. So if your rec management system that you're using has communication tools built into it take advantage of them and use them to communicate with the key members of a family support network. Michelle: That's really important, making sure that everybody has the right information at the right time. Our next point is probably something that's going to come towards the end of either a particular program or perhaps your season overall and that's conducting regular safety audits. Here you're going to review any incident reports for anything that took place, make a note of any learning that could be valuable for the future, and also see if there are better ways to respond to the various emergency situations or events - there's always room for learning and of course refining and improving your processes. Meet with your staff whether they're specific to that particular program or camp or overall - find out about their experiences, what incidents or emergency situations they dealt with, and what they have learned, and then take that information into your own consideration and also share your own information with them to help provide details that can better serve everyone in the future. Sharing those ideas keeps everybody improving and moving forward. Get feedback from campers and their families - find out what's important to them, what their experience was if their child had a medical emergency, and find out what they felt was done really well and also where there's room for improvement. Now that we've come to the end of our general best practices I'm going to hand it over to Matt, who's going to talk about some challenges that parks and recreation departments may experience. Matt: The biggest challenge for many recreation agencies and departments is that most of this information is still being collected on paper and not only is that labor intensive for recreation staff but it's also very time consuming for parents. I'm sure we probably have some parents on today's webinar that can relate to that pain of having to fill out yet another paper form. In addition to this process being time consuming for everyone it also presents a significant risk for organizations. If one of your staff or one of the children in your group required immediate medical attention the last thing you want to do is delay your emergency response time because you're busy searching for their medical history or an emergency contact phone number in a stack of paper forms. Emergencies are considered emergencies because they're unexpected which is why the collection of these critical details is so important for your organization. In a medical emergency either outdated prescriptions or old medical conditions could greatly affect the treatment that an individual receives. If a child needs to be picked up from camp, inaccurate contact information for an alternate Guardian could mean that child doesn't get picked up quickly or might even be picked up by someone who's no longer considered an emergency contact. When it comes to any of this medical or emergency information for any child or even any staff member these details can change quickly. We here at ePACT, conducted a survey a couple years ago and we found that over the course of four months more than thirty percent of forms would fall out of date. If this information does change it also requires a very tedious process of obtaining a new form to resubmit or having someone manually update that existing copy. For a child that's already out at camp that can create issues in getting that information to the right people quickly. All emergency, all medical information should always be easily and quickly accessible so that your staff can respond to any unexpected situation. When reviewing your processes it's very important to consider the following - who has access to this information and how long would it take them to access that information and review it? You also want to ask yourself does your recreation management system allow frontline staff to access participant information or if it's perhaps just limited to front desk staff? If you are using paper forms is it easy for program leaders to quickly find this information in a binder that might be filled with hundreds of forms? Also are these forms in a format that's going to be legible for staff and emergency services? Research has actually showed us that on average it can take upwards of 5 minutes to find that information if it's still being stored on paper and that can have a huge impact on the well-being of your program participants. I probably don't have to tell anyone on today's webinar how critical the security and privacy of participant information is. Whether you're using a recreation management system or paper forms to collect emergency information, you want to ask yourself the following questions - who has access to your participant records? Only recreation staff should have access to the records that pertain to the program participants that are in their care - they should not be able to see information for participants who are not in their immediate group. Is this information secure with a password or even a physical lock on a cabinet? Whether information is accessible at a rec center or out at camp it should always be secure. You also want to ask yourself is your system or systems that you have in place - are those compliant with privacy laws in your region - whether they be state privacy requirements or federal privacy laws such as HIPAA. And finally you also want to ask yourself is there a way for you to quickly remove a program staff access to all this critical information once they're no longer responsible for the participants that are in their group? Or is there a process that you can put in place to collect all those paper forms at the end of camp or even away in your rec management system to quickly turn off their access? These are just some of the common challenges that we've heard from some of our existing customers that we work with and also other recreation agencies that we speak with on a daily basis. I want to leave you guys with a few takeaways to keep top of mind - the security of this information is paramount, so ensure that any system that you're using to collect medical and emergency information is HIPAA compliant and that they also conduct regular safety and security audits. I know for us at ePACT, because of the sensitivity of the information that departments are collecting, with ePACT, we're actually required to go through a very thorough safety audit every single year to ensure that we're meeting any government compliances and are up to date with any new security measures. If you are collecting this information online, do you have the appropriate security measures in place? Any online form should always be hosted on a secure site that should also be equipped with industry standard SSL data encryption and what that means is that it's ensuring that any data that's passed between your systems and your customers' computers will be encrypted. Always make sure that this information is up-to-date - be sure that, prior to the start of any recreation program, you and your staff are accessing the most up-to-date information. One way to help out with this is to send an email out to all your parents prior to the start of a program asking them to notify you of any changes to a child's information and always ensure that this information is quickly accessible. Be sure that any authorized staff are well aware of where this information is being stored. If you're collecting this information on paper forms perhaps have two copies - one for program staff to take with them and then also one that can be kept behind in a secure location within your office. If you're collecting this information electronically be sure that all your staff are fully trained on how to quickly retrieve this information through either a computer or mobile app. In the event of an emergency every second counts so it's imperative that you're able to access this information as quickly as possible. I'm going to hand things back to Michelle for some Q&A. Michelle: That's it for our main content today and we do have a couple of questions that have come in so I'm just going to go down the list here - our information is often wrong from emergency contacts with phone numbers being wrong. How do we ensure that our info is accurate? Matt: I would always ask for multiple methods of communication or different ways that you can contact them so if you're asking for a phone number always ask for the email address so if the phone number is wrong you can still get through to them via email to maybe confirm that that phone numbers up to date and vice versa. Michelle: One other question that we have - With all the concerns about data breaches how can we be sure that information stored online is safe. I think that falls under your compliance piece there Matt. Matt: Absolutely. When it comes to capturing any of this type of information online it's critical to ensure that only the right people or authorized staff have access to this information. This actually in short summarizes how HIPAA compliance works which is a requirement if you are going to be collecting any type of medical or emergency information online. Michelle: Who would you suggest appointing as the safety point person. For example is this a camp director or recreation supervisor etc. For that one it doesn't necessarily have to be someone in a particular role but it should definitely be someone who's familiar with all of the different types of programs that are available within your organization so that they can take those specific safety needs into account. Also somebody who's familiar with all of the different locations that your activities or programs can take part in and then including those common safety concerns that they run into. It's really somebody's expertise and familiarity with programs and then locations, so while this could be one of the previously mentioned roles it doesn't necessarily have to be one of them - it could be one of your regular camp staff who happens to live and work regularly in the area as well. Matt: One thing I'll add to that previous question - when it comes to making sure you have the right information I think with emergency contacts by sending out an email maybe a couple weeks before the start of programs to all those emergency contacts or maybe just reminding them that they've been assigned an emergency contact for the following program so if you do get some bounce backs it does give you a bit of time to maybe go back to the parents from that emergency contact and let them know and say they received a bounce back or I think we might have the wrong phone number can you please update this information, so that day one whether it's the start of camps, the start of child care or say a soccer program, you have the most up-to-date information. Michelle: For any other questions will actually just do a quick follow up afterwards just because I think there's a couple here to probably best serve with an email so other than that, that concludes our webinar today. We're just coming up to the 30 minute mark and want to be respectful of your time so as I mentioned before please hang around for just a few moments once the webinar is over to complete the survey and let us know what you thought about today's session and topic. We really do appreciate your feedback and as I said before it let us continue to bring you relevant and useful content that you can take away with you. Thank you all for joining us today and we hope to see you again really soon.