No abstract

After every emergency exercise or actual incident, reports are circulated that usually identify lessons that have been learned from the event. This paper identifies recurring themes from the lessons learned that can be widely applied across sectors. Typically, lessons are expressed in a form that is specific to the actual event that has transpired, the sector in which it has occurred, and the aims of the reporting organization. Reports relating to seven incidents that have occurred in the United Kingdom and internationally, from a range of sectors and with varying parameters, have been reviewed. It is concluded that organizations can become wiser by looking at incidents outside their own sector and by using these recurring themes to explore the resilience of their emergency plans. Recommendations are also made for best practices to improve the learning of lessons within organizations.

The successful management of a complex, hazardous event in many domains demands a high level of incident command skills. In the oil and gas exploration and production industry, these skills were required by members of an Incident Management Team (IMT) established to respond the failure of a drilling riser in the Gulf of Mexico. When an incident occurs, members of an industrial IMT form an interdisciplinary, interdependent, but ad-hoc team. As actual experience of dealing with major incidents of this nature is relatively rare, IMT members have to rely on emergency exercises in training, along with existing domain-specific knowledge. Following a serious incident on an offshore drilling rig, semi-structured interviews with the on-shore strategic and tactical level IMT members (n 5 7) were conducted. These interviews have resulted in the identification and definition of incident command skills for members of an industrial IMT, namely decision making, situation awareness, communication, leadership, and teamwork, all of which can be affected by stress, as well as organisational factors that influenced the outcome of the incident. Limitations in current incident management training were identified, namely the need for specific incident command skills training. A framework is suggested around which specific incident command skills training can be structured. Key learnings from this case study are also presented which can provide guidance for the training and preparation of industrial incident management teams.

There is growing recognition of the need to train non‐technical skills, especially decision making, for emergency management in high reliability industries as well as in contained environments such as prisons. This article presents a training method, Tactical Decision Games, which appears to provide a good opportunity to practise the non‐technical skills that would be required in the management of an emergency situation. Case studies from the UK nuclear power industry and the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) illustrate the adaptability and general application of TDGs for training of emergency response teams in a range of operational settings.