Twenty Red Cross colleagues (12 female) gathered in Hanoi on 22 October to be oriented on the Preparedness for Effective Response (PER) process. This is the first among five Phases of the process including Orientation -> Assessment -> Prioritization and Analysis -> Work-Plan -> Action and Accountability.

All colleagues (Viet Nam RC and Partner National Societies) participated in the meeting expressed their interest and commitment to be part of the process.

Preparedness for Effective Response (PER) is a cyclical approach for a National Society (NS) to systematically assess, measure, and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of its response system in order to take remedial actions. The PER approach puts the NS in the driver’s seat to construct a work-plan that when implemented should improve its overall response capacity. The approach complements other major RCRC Movement tools including the Organisational Capacity Assessment and Certification (OCAC), Branch Organisational Capacity Assessment (BOCA), and Safer Access Framework (SAF).

Orientation Workshop at VNRC HQs on 22 October 2018. Photo by IFRC

From 10- 14 November 2018, 20 (7 female) VNRC colleagues representing various department of VNRC HQs and disaster-prone provinces gathered in Da Nang city for an intensive self-assessment workshop to go through every individual benchmark of 37 components and five sub-components to discuss in detail what each benchmark means to the VNRC and where the National Society stands on each of them before giving overall priority and score for each component.

Representatives participated in the self-assessment workshop are: Disaster Management; Health and Care; General Office (Logistics and Admin); Finance; Human Resource/OD; Inspection/PMER; International Relations; central region Disaster Management Centre; southern region HQ Office; and seven (7) disaster- prone provinces throughout the country. In addition, a representative from American RC was present throughout the workshop.

According to participants’ feedback that the workshop was a brilliant opportunity for them to better understand comprehensively what it means when it comes to Preparedness for Effective Response (PER) and it is indeed a very informative session for all. In-depth discussion was seen in various components and sub-components where the NS felt “good performance” and “needs to be improved” or “partially exist”. In addition, the use of slido.com in voting and prioritisation made the workshop more interactive and excited for all.

From the workshop, seven components and sub-components were prioritized the most for moving further to develop a workplan to address them in the future. The selection was based on scoring and their importance:

All in all, participants enjoyed the process and suggested the tool should be further fine-tuned and polished (language and terminologies) so that VNRC could further use it in other assessments such as extended BOCA (under Red Ready Initiative) and so on so forth.

Moving forward: Work-Plan Phase expects to be taken place in the second half of December.