Person-Centred Emergency Preparedness (P-CEP) Online Certificate Course
2nd Feb – 9th March 2026
Enhance your emergency preparedness skills.
Overview
Everybody needs an emergency plan. This course helps you to make your own emergency plan and know how to facilitate preparedness with others.
Person-Centred Emergency Preparedness (P-CEP) enables people to self-assess their preparedness, capabilities and support needs and develop a personal emergency plan for how they will:
- manage their support needs in emergencies; and
- act together with their support network before, during, and after a disaster.
Led by Associate Professor Michelle Villeneuve and her team at the Centre for Disability Research and Policy, the National Resilient Australia Award-winning P-CEP Certificate Course:
- is a world first interdisciplinary program providing actionable guidance on person-centred and capability focused inclusive disaster risk reduction.
- was designed to ensure a consistent approach to facilitate emergency preparedness support with individuals and groups.
- was co-developed and evaluated for its effectiveness. Learn more about the course evaluation and findings.
What you'll learn
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Apply the 4 P-CEP action steps to strengthen your own emergency preparedness.
- Develop knowledge, skills, and confidence to enable P-CEP with others.
- Connect and learn together with other stakeholders to advance P-CEP in your role and community context.
The multi award-winning P-CEP process tool and framework:
- focuses on function (not impairments), local community assets, and cross-sector collaboration as the basis for removing barriers that increase risk for people with disability and other groups at greater risk in emergencies.
- emphasises the capabilities of people with disability and the roles of multiple stakeholders in reducing disaster risk, consistent with Australia’s national Emergency Management and Disability Strategies.
- recognises that inclusion is intersectional and considers other elements of diversity (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, language and cultural differences, etc.) to support more comprehensive and inclusive emergency management.
- was co-designed and tested with people with disability, their supporting services, government and emergency services agencies, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Content
- Become aware of and understand the disproportionate risks experienced by people with disabilities and the current legislative context relating to people with disabilities and disasters.
- Recognise the importance of person-centred approaches to enable emergency preparedness and improve outcomes for people with disabilities in disasters.
- Understand and communicate the importance of P-CEP Step 1 in enabling equitable access to emergency preparedness for people with disability.
- Understand the value and utility of the Capability Wheel as a tool to self-assess capabilities and support needs.
- Know and use effective strategies to start person-centred emergency preparedness conversations with individuals and in group settings.
- Recognise the importance of informal and formal social support networks as a critical component of person-centred emergency preparedness planning.
- Practice P-CEP Step 1 on yourself and then with others to develop confidence and facilitation skills at Step 1 of P-CEP.
- Know and use effective strategies to support genuine self-assessment of preparedness for emergencies.
- Understand and explain the different roles and levels of responsibility of individuals, organisations and governments have before, during, and after emergencies.
- Use the capability wheel to enable individuals to self-assess the impact of emergencies on preparedness, response, and recovery and what that means for future preparedness planning.
- Facilitate linkages between individuals and emergency information, people and resources to support tailored emergency preparedness matched to support needs.
- Practice P-CEP Step 2 on yourself and then with others to develop confidence and facilitation skills at Step 2 of P-CEP.
- Enable tailored emergency preparedness planning matched to support needs including:
- Identify priority areas for preparedness actions.
- Match local hazard risks to preparedness planning.
- Leverage strengths and capabilities to increase preparedness.
- Anticipate challenges that may arise during emergencies and create a plan to address them.
- Develop a suite of tips and strategies to collaboratively make a plan that fits the individual.
- Practice P-CEP Step 3 on yourself and then with others to develop confidence and facilitation skills at Step 3 of P-CEP.
- Identify key features of effective plans.
- Recognise the critical importance communicating the plan with the individual’s support network.
- Appreciate the essential role of advocacy in enabling person-centred emergency preparedness.
- Practice P-CEP Step 4 on yourself and then with others to develop confidence and facilitation skills at Step 4 of P-CEP.
- Recognise different ways of delivering of P-CEP and understand their related strengths and challenges.
- Reflect on your current role and context to identify where and how P-CEP can be embedded.
- Identify potential barriers and enablers that could impact your implementation of P-CEP, and develop strategies on how to address or capitalise on these factors.
Introduction to Disability, Disasters and Person-Centred Emergency and Preparedness
This module provides you with essential pre-requisite knowledge to understand the issues faced by people with disabilities in disasters. Upon completing this module you will:
Step 1: Understanding Everyday Strengths and Support Needs
Upon completing this module you will:
Step 2: Self-Assessing Level of Preparedness and Learning about Disaster Risk
Upon completing this module you will:
Step 3: Making a Plan to Manage in an Emergency
Upon completing this module you will:
Step 4: Communicating the Plan to the Support Network and Addressing Gaps Through Collaboration
Upon completing this module you will:
Implementing P-CEP in the Community
This final module is designed to guide you in integrating P-CEP into your role, organisation, and community effectively.
Upon completing this module you will:
Upon completing the course, you will receive a Certificate of Completion and be invited to join P-CEP Connect - the community of practice of P-CEP facilitators who have also completed this learning opportunity.
This course is suitable for anyone who would like to learn how to facilitate person-centred emergency preparedness.
This includes:
- Service providers who provide services and support to people with disability, chronic health conditions and other people at greater disaster risk (e.g., aged care; housing/homelessness services; child & youth services, etc.)
- Disability representatives and advocates who engaged in self, individual and systemic advocacy.
- Emergency services staff and volunteers who work with their communities to make sure people understand their risk and take preparedness actions.
- Council community engagement and emergency management staff, community resilience and disaster recovery workers who plan for community resilience, emergencies and disaster recovery.
- People with disability and carers who are interested in learning more about P-CEP to advance their own plans.
This course has 6 modules that equip you with the skills and knowledge you need to use P-CEP to make your own plan for emergency and facilitate P-CEP for others. All course content is delivered online, in a self-paced format. You will have 5 weeks to complete the modules. You will be learning alongside others and will have the opportunity to interact and network with them using the online discussion boards.
Participation in online modules involves:
- reading, watching, and listening to course content.
- answering questions by posting your response to discussion board posts and responding to the posts of others.
- completing a multiple-choice quiz at the end of the final module about the course content.
Accessibility:
The immersive reader function in Canvas allows all written content to be read to you. Canvas also works well with screen readers. Closed captions and transcripts are available for all video content.
Accommodations to make the course more accessible for you can be made. Please discuss any accommodations or questions about accessibility via email to Collaborating.4Inclusion@sydney.edu.au.
Course materials will be accessed online following enrolment.
You will need access to your own device with a strong internet connection, such as a laptop or desktop computer. This course is managed through a Learning Management System (Canvas). Once enrolled, you will be provided with login details.
All courses must be paid in advance of commencing your course. We accept the following payment methods:
- Mastercard
- Visa
- American Express (only available for enrolments made through the Sydney Short Courses website)
- Electronic Funds Transfer (for company invoices only)
- Journal Transfer (for University of Sydney Staff only)
Please see our Payment Options for further information.
Important information
- The enrolment links in "Upcoming classes" below are for the self-paced course running from 2nd February – 9th March 2026 . The multiple 'enrol' links are simply to place participants into smaller groups within this course, which improves the learning experience.
- Although you can work through the course content at your own pace, it must still be completed within this timeframe.
- When you enrol, you will receive access to the Learning Management System, Canvas, but the content won't be made available until the 2nd February 2026.
