| Course | PU545 Disaster Management |
|---|---|
| Unit | Unit 8 |
| Paper type | Tabletop exercise design |
| Length | About 1,010 words, 6 pages double-spaced |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Purdue University Global |
| Program | Master of Public Health (MPH) |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for PU545 Unit 8
One Question at 2:40 in the Morning: A Unit 8 Tabletop Exercise Designed to Expose Whether Anyone in Composite Brennock County May Order Nine Long-Term Care Facilities to Evacuate Overnight
[Student Name]
Purdue University Global
PU545: Disaster Management
Unit 8 Tabletop Exercise Design
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
Brennock County, the facilities and the exercise scenario are composite; the exercise design method and the research cited are real.
The Weakness Being Tested
County staff give three different answers to one question: who may direct a licensed long-term care facility to evacuate when the threat is hours away and the facility's administrator disagrees. The health officer believes the authority is theirs under the public health emergency statute. The emergency manager believes it requires a declaration by the board chair. Two facility administrators believe no county official can direct them at all, only the state licensing agency. The exercise is designed to put that question in front of all three at once, under time pressure, with a record of what they decide. Nothing else in the exercise matters as much, and the design says so to keep facilitators from wandering into easier subjects.
Objectives
1. Determine whether participants can identify, within 20 minutes, who holds authority to direct a facility evacuation and under what instrument.
2. Determine whether the group can produce a defensible decision for all nine facilities within 90 minutes of the forecast change.
3. Test whether transportation and receiving-facility capacity can be established by the agencies in the room rather than assumed.
4. Observe whether the decision accounts for the mortality risk of moving frail residents as well as the risk of leaving them.
Objectives are written as questions with observable answers, because an objective such as improving coordination cannot be failed and therefore cannot be learned from.
Participants
Health officer and deputy; emergency management deputy director; board of health chair; county attorney; administrators or directors of nursing from all nine long-term care facilities; hospital emergency preparedness manager; emergency medical services operations chief; two school transportation representatives; state licensing liaison; regional health care coalition coordinator. Twenty-four to twenty-eight people at one table arrangement, with no observers permitted to speak. The county attorney's presence is essential and is the reason the exercise is scheduled around their calendar.
Scenario and Injects
1. Start, 2:40 a.m. in scenario time. Forecast crest at Halvern revised from 24.5 to 27.0 feet, arriving in 11 hours. Four of the nine facilities are below 27 feet. The emergency manager is unreachable for the first 30 minutes of the exercise, by design.
2. Inject at 20 minutes. One facility administrator states that their corporate office has instructed them to shelter in place and that county staff have no authority over the decision.
3. Inject at 45 minutes. Emergency medical services reports that it can move 14 non-ambulatory residents in the next six hours, against 96 who cannot walk.
4. Inject at 70 minutes. The receiving facility named in two of the four evacuation plans is itself below 27 feet.
5. Inject at 95 minutes. A local television reporter asks the county for a statement on whether nursing homes are being evacuated, before any decision has been made.
6. Inject at 120 minutes. The forecast is revised down to 25.5 feet. Participants must decide whether to continue, pause or reverse, which is the inject that reveals whether the earlier decision had any stated criteria.
The forecast revision at two hours is the heart of the exercise: a group with criteria can answer it, and a group with only a decision cannot.
Schedule
Welcome and ground rules, 15 minutes. Scenario module one, 50 minutes. Break, 10. Module two with injects three and four, 50 minutes. Module three with injects five and six, 45 minutes. Hot wash, 30 minutes. Closing and evaluation forms, 10. Total three hours and thirty minutes, which is the limit at which facility administrators stop attending, so the design fits the participants rather than the material.
Ground Rules
No-fault environment, with the explicit statement that findings name systems and not people. Participants play their own roles and may say what they would actually do rather than what the plan says. Plans may be consulted, because the exercise is testing whether the plan can be used under pressure. Mobile phones are allowed, since in the real event they would be. One facilitator, two evaluators, and no scenario arguments: if someone disputes the hydrology, the facilitator rules and moves on.
Evaluation
Each objective has an evaluator with a form and a clock. The first objective is scored by the time stamp on the first correct statement of authority and by whether anyone contradicts it afterward. The second is scored on whether a written decision exists for all nine facilities at 90 minutes. The third is scored by whether transportation numbers come from the agencies present or are asserted by the facilitator's scenario. The fourth is scored by whether the mortality trade-off of moving long-stay residents is raised by a participant without prompting, since the evidence that evacuation itself carries risk is the content most often missing from these discussions (Dosa et al., 2012). Evaluation of this kind measures what the system did rather than who attended, which is the distinction that makes an exercise worth its cost (Savoia et al., 2014).
Hot Wash and What Comes After
The hot wash asks three questions and nothing else: what surprised you, what would you have done differently with the plan in front of you, and what single document would have resolved the authority question. Findings go into a draft after action report within 10 business days, each finding paired with a corrective action, an owner and a date, and the authority question goes to the county attorney for a written opinion regardless of what the exercise concludes. Tabletop exercises of this design are a standard and inexpensive way to test public health decision-making precisely because they can be built around one suspected gap and run with the real decision-makers in the room (Dausey et al., 2007).
References
Dausey, D. J., Buehler, J. W., & Lurie, N. (2007). Designing and conducting tabletop exercises to assess public health preparedness. BMC Public Health, 7, 92. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-7-92
Dosa, D., Hyer, K., Thomas, K., Swaminathan, S., Feng, Z., Brown, L., & Mor, V. (2012). To evacuate or shelter in place: Implications of universal hurricane evacuation policies on nursing home residents. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 13(2), 190.e1-190.e7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jamda.2011.07.011
Savoia, E., Agboola, F., & Biddinger, P. D. (2014). A conceptual framework to measure systems' performance during emergency preparedness exercises. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 11(9), 9712-9722. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph110909712
What the PU545 Unit 8 assignment asks for
Unit 8 usually asks for an exercise design document rather than a narrative of an exercise. Name the weakness you intend to expose before writing the scenario, and keep every element pointed at it. Write objectives as questions with observable answers, since an objective such as improving coordination cannot be failed and therefore teaches nothing. List participants by role and say which attendance is essential. Build injects in sequence so each one removes an assumption the previous discussion relied on, and include at least one that reverses direction to test whether decisions had criteria. Set a schedule the participants will actually sit through. State ground rules, including no-fault and whether plans may be consulted. Assign an evaluator and a measure to each objective, and say what happens to the findings.
How the PU 545 Unit 8 example is put together
The design on this page names the suspected weakness first, with three officials giving three different answers to one question, and a margin note explains why an exercise written to look good tests nothing. Four objectives follow, each phrased as a question with a timed or documentary answer. Participants are listed by role, with the county attorney identified as essential. Six injects run from a corporate instruction to shelter in place through a receiving facility that is itself underwater, ending with a forecast revision that a highlighted line identifies as the heart of the exercise. A second margin note explains the inject sequence. Schedule, ground rules and evaluation follow, with a third note on why one objective is scored only if a participant raises the issue unprompted, and the hot wash asks three questions.
Where the points sit in the PU545 Unit 8 rubric
Purdue Global rubrics for an exercise design score the fit between the gap, the scenario and the evaluation. Most of the points go to objectives that can be observed and failed, and to injects that each test something rather than adding drama. Credit goes to a participant list that names the person whose absence would make the exercise pointless, and to a schedule sized to the audience. Ground rules earn marks when they settle the questions that derail discussions, including whether plans may be consulted and who rules on scenario disputes. Evaluation carries a substantial block: each objective needs an evaluator and a measure. The closing section is graded on whether findings become corrective actions with owners and dates rather than a summary of the conversation.
PU545 Unit 8 help: mistakes that cost points
Three mistakes account for most lost marks. The first is a scenario so large that it tests everything and measures nothing; one gap per exercise is the discipline. The second is objectives written as aspirations, which cannot be scored. The third is an inject list that escalates without removing assumptions, so the group never has to revisit a decision. Keep the exercise inside the time the participants will give you, since an exercise nobody finishes produces no findings. Avoid supplying the answer in the scenario material if you want to know whether the county already has it. And do not end at the hot wash: name the report, the deadline and the owner. We can design the exercise for your own prompt within two days.
Get a PU545 Unit 8 example written to your instructions
Every PU545 Unit 8 exercise design needs a target. Point to the weakness yours should expose, or the plan it tests, and pass on the prompt, the rubric and whatever exercise template the course expects. Due inside 24-48 hours, the free first custom sample then aims every objective, module and inject at that one gap. The paper above is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official Purdue University Global document.
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PU545 Unit 8 questions, answered
Where can I find a free PU545 Unit 8 sample paper?
The complete exercise design, objectives, injects, schedule and evaluation plan, is on this page.
How many objectives should a tabletop have?
Three or four, each written as a question with an answer somebody can observe and time.
What makes a good inject?
One that removes an assumption the discussion has been resting on, such as a receiving facility that turns out to be in the flood zone.
Why make the emergency manager unreachable?
Because the suspected weakness is about authority. Keeping the obvious decision-maker out of the room for thirty minutes is how the design exposes it.
How long should a tabletop run?
Three to three and a half hours here, which is the limit at which the facility administrators needed in the room will still attend.