14 | ESTEVENTS - ESS2016 PREVIEW
Operational excellence on show in The Learning Zone The Emergency Services Show 2016 Event Director David Brown is delighted that friends from JESIP – the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme – and the National Operational Guidance Programme (NOGP) are curating the content for the show’s seminar programme focused on operational excellence. It’s called The Learning Zone and that’s exactly what visitors will experience when they visit this year’s Emergency Services Show. JESIP – the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme – and NOGP were both established in 2012. Since then JESIP has made great strides in improving the way the police, fire and rescue and ambulance services work together when responding to incidents. And for the fire and rescue service, the new investment in guidance by NOGP, which draws from best practice across the service, means that fire and rescue services are consistent when working across borders but also with the other emergency responders. So they are perfectly placed to put together the amazing programme for this year’s Learning Zone at The Emergency Services Show.
“Learning from others is key to organisational learning.” The Learning Zone seminar programme has been divided up into discrete segments to allow you to best plan your visit to the show and include a focused learning session that suits you and your interests. You can, of course, stay for more, but we know that your time is precious and you’ll want to pack as much into your visit as you can.
Organisational learning Day one kicks off with a session focused on the principles of organisational learning, both from an academic perspective and an individual service perspective. Is organisational learning different whether you’re in the fire and rescue service, ambulance service or police? NOGP will share their work in this area as they have a project devoted to organisational learning, which sits alongside the wider suite of guidance that is in development. One of the original objectives for JESIP was to have a Joint Organisational Learning strategy fully embedded nationally. The JESIP team will set out what Joint Organisational Learning (JOL) is about. They want JOL to become a national repository for interoperability lessons and notable practice. This session will help you
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learn about it and how you and your organisations can contribute to its success.
Exercise Unified Response It’s always helpful to have the learning from specific incidents and looking at incidents from different perspectives, whether that’s from individual emergency services, local authorities or from business owners. There will be two great case studies that will allow you to hear all about the different agencies’ perspectives on what came out of incidents . You’ll also have a chance to quiz our speakers in a panel Q&A session. There will be more detail on this in the coming weeks. To end the first day of the Learning Zone, an extended session will focus on the learning from Exercise Unified Response. This massive training exercise in London, which took place earlier this year, simulated a significant building collapse, incorporating heavy transport and mass casualties in a simulated Waterloo station. All of London’s emergency response organisations, including local and national authorities were involved. You’ll learn from the team who put together the biggest multi-agency training exercise in London Fire Brigade’s history.
Flooding focus The second day of The Learning Zone continues with the same pace and quality of input but this time focuses on two particular areas of operational response: flooding; and search and rescue. Dave Walton, the Deputy Chief Fire Officer for West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, will facilitate the morning’s session and focus on what can be learnt from responding to floods. Dave is fantastically well placed to do this as he was Gold command during the extensive flooding incidents across Yorkshire and Cumbria over Christmas 2015. He’ll start by sharing his experience of these challenging days and what he and the agencies involved learned. It’s not always about what doesn’t work of course; it’s about reinforcing what does work and sharing that widely with others. Complementing Dave’s session on the Christmas 2015 floods will be Marcus Van Sameren from the Environment Agency and Heather Shepherd from the National Flood Forum.
Search and rescue Search and rescue will be the focus for the final session of The Learning Zone, in the afternoon of Thursday 22 September. The session will focus on a single incident and look at it from different angles. You’ll have heard a lot about the tragic incident at Bosley Mill in Cheshire where, on 17 July 2015, four people sadly lost their lives. Organisers are indebted to Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service for allowing the session to focus on the Bosley Mill incident. Gus O’Rourke and colleagues will share with us how Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service was able to respond to this incident and, more importantly for us, what they have learnt about their own policies and procedures. Sian Corrigan from Cheshire’s communications team will provide us with a fascinating insight into crisis communications and what they have learnt about media handling during incidents like Bosley. To complement this, we will also get a national resilience perspective. When an incident as large as Bosley happens, urban search and rescue teams can be mobilised and assist local services. With contributions from Tony Brown, from Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, and Rob Norman, from the CFOA National Resilience Assurance Team, find out how the national response works and what they’ve learnt from Bosley and other incidents.
Impressive speakers Organisers of The Emergency Services Show 2016 are delighted that JESIP and NOGP have been able to put together such a wide ranging programme of learning packed with impressive speakers and know you will want to take some time out of your busy diaries to visit the show, come along to The Learning Zone, sit back, listen and learn. Learning from others is key to organisational learning; so make sure you take it back to your own organisations because it’s the sharing that really counts.
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June2016