Completing your Hazard Vulnerability Analysis

The analysis has 52 hazards across the four categories a surveyor expects: natural, technological, human, and hazardous materials. Calchis pre-fills one column of it — probability, from your county's federal record — and leaves the other six to you, because those are judgements about your building that no record holds.

What each column asks

Probability — how likely this is here. For the natural hazards it arrives filled in, with the basis printed beside it, and you can change it; a changed figure is recorded as yours rather than passed off as the record's. For the technological, human and hazmat rows it starts blank, because no county record knows a generator's service history or the chemicals in your plant room.

Human, Property and Business impact — deaths and injuries, physical loss and the cost of repair, and interruption to services including patients you would have to divert. 0 is not applicable, 3 is high.

Preparedness, Internal response and External response — these run the other way. 1 is good and 3 is poor. A hazard you have written plans for, drilled against and can handle with your own staff scores 1. This is the Kaiser convention and it is the single thing people get wrong: carry “3 = high” across from the impact columns and you will rate your best-prepared hazards as your worst. The three columns say 1 good under their headings on screen for exactly this reason.

Zero is an answer; blank is not

A probability of 0 says the facility has decided this hazard cannot occur here. That is a finding, and it is scored as one. A blank means nobody has judged it yet, and a row with any blank is not scored at all — treating a blank as zero would quietly rank an unfinished hazard as harmless, which is the opposite of what it means.

How relative risk is worked out

Severity is the six columns added together, 0 to 18. Relative risk is (probability / 3) × (severity / 18) × 100, as a percentage. It is recomputed every time you change a cell and it is never stored: a saved percentage would go stale the moment a rating changed, and two answers to one question is how a document loses trust.

Filling it in without 364 dropdowns

Three ways, and you can mix them:

• In the grid. Tab moves across the row; typing a digit sets the cell. Save writes only the hazards you touched.
• In a spreadsheet. Export to CSV, work on it with the people who actually rate these things, and bring it back. The import previews what would change before it changes anything, and one unreadable row refuses the whole file with its line number rather than importing half of it.
• From last year. On a facility that has an assessment for the previous year, Fill blanks from {year} drops last year's ratings into the cells you have left blank. It never overwrites an answer you have given this year, nothing is saved until you press Save, and every filled cell stays outlined until you have looked at it.

Approving it

Approval needs the name and title of whoever is approving it, and it freezes the document: the ratings cannot change until someone reopens it, and a reopen is recorded as one. A correction after approval is next year's assessment, or a deliberate reopen — not a quiet edit.

You can set your own next-review date. Calchis does not state a cadence, because what you owe depends on your facility type and your accrediting body, and this document does not tell you what your obligation is.

More than one building

Vulnerability Analyses in the navigation lists every facility you monitor, which are approved, which are still drafts, which have not started, and what each one's own ratings put at the top. Above the list, hazards that recur across sites are counted — a hazard top-ranked at five of six hospitals is a system-level programme rather than one site's problem. No percentage is averaged across buildings there: two sites' ratings answer different questions.

What comes out

The printed PDF carries the four numbered sections, the summary by category, the ranking by relative risk, what changed since last year with the facility's own moves separated from the county record's, the arithmetic stated in full, and the completion and approval block. It is the document you hand over, and everything on it can be checked against a federal row.

For where the pre-filled probability comes from, and which live National Weather Service products should activate the plan the analysis supports, see Your HVA and the triggers that activate your plan.