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Technical Rescue Magazine - Better Decisions save more lives

Tuesday, 9th February 2010

Transcript

Source: Technical Rescue Magazine

Technical rescue unit Howth Coast Guard is one of 55 voluntary Irish Coast Guard rescue teams. Howth specialises in coastal technical rescue with 24 rescue volunteers on-call, fully qualified in sea cliff rescue, high-angle rescue, water rescue, missing person search,and first aid response.Looking at how to make teams ‘smarter’ with their training, and improve preventative measures, the Irish Coast Guard have supplied their teams with an official trial of a web application for rescue team management.

Just launched by an Irish company, the tool called Decisions For Heroeshelps organisations like Lifeboats, Coast Guard, and other team-based emergency services record and analyse their rescue operations. Identifying that better decisions save lives, the software was created to monitor rescuers response readiness, availability, qualifications, and experience. Armed with a laptop and internet connection, 999/911 responders can record the details of rescue operations and their training exercises. The software automatically performs analytical charting, draws heatmaps, and benchmarks reports to outline areas of strength, weakness, and domain expertise.Officer in Charge of Howth, Colin Murray, has limited time for paperwork but still needs to know his team's status at all times. Colin has configured Decisions For Heroesto send him an automated weekly briefing email every Monday, containing a report of every team members’ activity and scheduled training plans.This week, the report outlines the 3 incidents the team attended at the weekend and alerts him that 4 members are off-call for 48 hours from Tuesday. Decisions has calculated they will be short a cliff rescue climber for training on Wednesday and prompts Colin to confirm extra cover, targeting his message to only qualified cliff rescue climbers on-call this week using the integrated email. Communications and team management are drastically improved by providing a central information store that members can access from home, work, or their mobile handsets in the field. As a team enter their records, the software builds a profile of each rescuer,tracking their qualifications, experience, training hours, and skill-sets automatically. Before the Wednesday training exercise, Colin signs in to Decisionsand runs his regular report on team attendance hours, getting a break-down of members skills requiring attention. Now he can determine what they trained in, who trained in it, and when theylast practised a technique. Easy-to-generate statistics can be used to observe patterns and reduce accidents in a community. With integrated mapping, teams can generate heat maps of their callouts and compare them to their training locations. Howth uses the mapping to observe hotspots where incidents are repeatedly recurring year after year. With this data the team have now approached the local council with real measurements to show wherewarning signs should be located and public safety awareness focussed.

Decisions For Heroeshas already been used by over 2,000 rescuers in 5 countries. If you're part of a team and would like to try the software out get started by calling UK (020) 323 999 04, US (408) 844 4965 or IRL (01) 442 9217 and ask to speak to the Team Contact for your area. Find out more at: www.decisionsforheroes.com

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