The consultation meeting for the 5th Regional Collaboration Drill 2023 ~ The preparation has been started! ~

The consultation meeting for the 5th Regional Collaboration Drill 2023 ~ The preparation has been started! ~

The first consultation meeting was held on 3rd February 2023 by inviting the Malaysia team from the Ministry of Health to start preparation for the 5th Regional Collaboration Drill (RCD) planned in September. The mentors from Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia who have experience facilitating whole the process of RCD in the past were involved in this meeting. In addition, the ASEAN Secretariat (ASEC), AHA Center, Japanese Advisory Committee for the ARCH Project, and Senior Advisor from the Secretariat of Japan Disaster Relief Team also assisted this meeting by providing advice or essential knowledge, especially for the International/ASEAN coordination mechanisms. The meeting aimed to discuss the concrete schedule/timelines, exercise scenario, and necessary preparations. At the end of the day, the meeting agreed the 5th RCD will be scheduled for 25th-28th September 2023.

The RCD is a comprehensive exercise to test EMT SOP in ASEAN which has been developed by the ARCH Project and document/report format for the Medical Record, Health Needs Assessment, and relevant tools, as well as to check the national protocol or rules to accept medical teams from foreign countries when the disaster affected country’s government declare the emergency. This exercise has been conducted every year since 2016 up to the suspension by the global pandemic and will be resumed in 2023 after the previous drill was conducted in 2019.

The scenario of this drill assumes a big-scale disaster beyond the national capacity to deal with which needs external assistance for a sufficient response to the affected people in the country. This drill focuses on medical response and disaster health management in the ASEAN aimed for smoother activation of regional response mechanisms including the table-top exercise and medical field-training exercise. In this drill, the skeleton EMTs from each country consisting of 1-2 doctors, 2 nurses, and 1-2 logisticians will be invited to practice whole process of deployment, medical response, and termination of the assistance. This drill will be expected to meet more than 200 participants together in Malaysia!

Start-up（2016）：Thailand「Mega Flood」
1st（2016）：Thailand「Tsunami at Southern Thailand」
2nd（2017）：Vietnam「Typhoon at coastal area」
3rd（2018）：The Philippines「Earthquake at metropolis」
4th（2019）：Indonesia「Volcano eruption」