“When all else breaks down, people run down the hallways with little sticky notes, and that’s not effective,” says Robert Luke, director of George Brown College’s Office of Applied Research and Innovation. “We managed SARS with paper, and that is egregious on one hand, but we learned a lot from SARS. The bottom line is communication is essential.”

As a direct result of SARS, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care produced core competencies for infection control, and the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion was much better prepared when H1N1 human swine flu came along. But those core competencies still need to be tested.

So the college is testing The Pandemic Management Toolkit from Tenet Computer Group, a web-based software package for large-scale emergencies. George Brown College’s School of Emergency Management and its Emergency Operations Centre — the only facilities of their kind in Canada — are assessing and refining the software through real-life simulations. There are three iterations of testing, and October is the target timeframe in terms of general availability.

Simulation is a viable way to learn, and it works hand in hand with the technology, says Luke. “The problem with disaster management is you can’t really learn on the job, because you don’t want a disaster to happen,” he said. “It’s also one of those skills that hopefully you don’t use. Unfortunately, when you do need it, you need to know it.”

The idea is to assist organizations in preparing for an emergency, executing on those plans and recovering after the emergency. By making the software web-based, it allows an organization to host the software with a preferred provider ”“ so it’s offsite, and it saves money. In Ontario, for example, there are around 220 hospitals, but many of them are small, rural and northern, so they don’t have the same IT resources as the large hospitals in Toronto.

George Brown is testing the Toolkit’s fan-out module capability, which provides users with a centralized means of communication. It uses a variety of tools — including e-mail, SMS, Blackberry PIN, the Internet, fax and telephone— to communicate with all members of an organization, and then tracks and organizes their responses to better coordinate the personnel required for the emergency. The Toolkit offers nine modules in total.

The project is funded in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, in support of industry-applied research. The work George Brown is doing with Tenet is one of the first projects it’s launching as part of the five-year funding initiative.

Pandemics in particular are tricky, because they’re typically a prolonged emergency, and you cannot expect help from your neighbouring cities or countries, says Carlos Paz-Soldan, president of Tenet Computer Group Inc. “With pandemics, you have the first wave going for seven or eight weeks, then a few months later it comes back with a vengeance, and it could last two or three years,” he said. “It’s more difficult to wing it when you have a prolonged pandemic.”

Pandemics are pervasive, and even medical experts can’t predict what will happen. They may need to change their medical directives, for example, because they discover a particular anti-viral doesn’t have the desired effect. “Pretty much every hospital has a pandemic plan in place, but nobody has had a chance to put it through its paces,” he said. If we had a pandemic where we lost 20 per cent of our workforce, not necessarily because they get sick, but also because of fear, we’d be in serious trouble, he added. (The Campbell reports said 20 per cent of nurses considered not going to work during SARS, though only about 10 per cent didn’t go).

George Brown has developed a state-of-the-art simulation centre in its Toronto Casa Loma campus for continuing education students, as well as nursing students. The college works closely with CAE, which provides the simulation software. It’s designed to test people under various stress situations to see how they function as a team and adjust to the parameters of the simulation as it’s conducted in real time.

A simulation could involve a toxic cloud moving toward a town, for example. A controller in a back room can change the conditions of the simulation — such as shifting the wind direction — and students must adapt their evacuation plans accordingly. Students are placed in different rooms (one for federal decision-makers, another for personnel on the ground), but they’re all connected to a phone and a computer with their own applications. If communications are “lost” during a simulation, then each group should know what to do in order to work in concert.

This allows them to figure out where mistakes happen or where a plan breaks down. “To simulate something around a boardroom is not quite the same,” says Paz-Soldan. “You can have the best plans, but if you cannot communicate this information then there’s no point.”