Community Action in Disaster Response Training of Trainer program in South/Southeast Asia

For those interested in community response teams, check out the Community Action in Disaster Response program implemented in 10 countries in Asia, where the Asia Disaster Preparedness Center is working with Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in a Training of Trainer approach to build response teams in vulnerable communities.  These teams walk away with critical life saving skills, such as how to safely conduct light search and rescue, basic first aid and water rescue.  

One of the most important aspects of the training is it’s aim to link coimmunity teams with professional responders. In this way CADRE exhibits an “incident command system” orientation, which promotes function-based training through modules, effective communication and connected service delivery directly linked to professional response systems. 

For example, CADRE teaches light search and rescue skills using signs that search and rescue professionals use. This might be life saving particularly in large scale, chaotic disasters, so when professionals arrive on the scene of a disaster where CADRE teams have been working, they can quickly ascertain that a CADRE team already evacuated a building as part of their triage, saving professionals time and from duplicating efforts.

CADRE complements other aspects of a wider Program for Enhanced Emergency Response (PEER), which include Medical First Reponse and Collapsed Structure Search and Rescue training for professionals and a parallel complementary training for Hospital Preparedness (HOPE) to deal with mass casualties PEER is a wider program supported by ADPC and the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET) , funded since 1998 by the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) under the United States Agency for International Development. The American Red Cross is a contributor to the CADRE program.

Community Action In Disaster Response training of trainers program, Asia Disaster Preparedness Center, National Society for Earthquake Technology-Nepal (NSET), Article about the Vietnam Red Cross implementing CADRE during a disaster, Overview of PEER Stage 3 at the Asia Disaster Preparedness Center
http://www.adpc.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/CADRE_brochureFINAL.pdf, http://www.adpc.net, http://www.nset.org.np/nset2012, http://www.redcross.org/news/article/Preparedness-Across-the-Globe, http://www.adpc.net/blog/?page_id=194