Abstract

Civil emergency planning is a key instrument utilized in order to prepare for crisis
management, including crisis response essentially. In Poland the crisis management
system has been regulated by a legal act in 2007. The law formulates the system
framework, its aims and tasks. Hence until today the system has been few times
audited by the Supreme Audit Office (NIK). The results of the audits are not fully
satisfactory what have been deeply elaborated in the article by desk research including
the reports and other sources critical analysis. Furthermore, the audits results
have been confronted with the results of diagnostic survey conveyed on a sample of
160 practitioners of the system. The survey was aimed at collecting, analysing and
interpreting the practitioners’ perceptions on the aspects criticised by the Supreme
Audit Office’s reports. In addition some statistical analyses have been made, including
correlations and significance tests, in order to ensure validity and reliability of
the findings. Finally, an elaboration on exercises as a valuable mechanism for civil
emergency planning improvements have been delivered.
As such the paper aims at verification of the Supreme Audit Office arrangements
by confronting them with the results of the conducted survey. Therefore, following
questions have been posed: how the civil emergency planning processes are perceived
by the practitioners of the crisis and disaster management system? Secondly, whether
exercises might be a relevant instrument to verify and validate existing plans?
In majority the key findings of the survey confirm the arrangements of the
Supreme Audit Office, enriching them with identification of highly probable causes
of this state of the art as well as reasoning behind the revealed status of the civil
emergency planning.