Operational
Keeping up with National Operational Guidance
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It has been an incredibly busy time for the National Operational Guidance Programme. With just 16 months until the end of the programme, there is a real push to deliver the final pieces of guidance and embed them across the fire and rescue service. FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports
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“Engagement
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here are currently six guidance projects under development that are at different stages in the production process. The programme is consulting on two new pieces of guidance. The first deals with potential hazards occurring subsurface, at height and in structural and confined space environments. The second guidance document has been developed to assist fire and rescue services in identifying hazards and implementing control measures at operational incidents where utility and fuel supplies might need to be managed or controlled. The proposed changes to how hazardous materials guidance is organised are fairly substantial and the team has been doing a lot of work to share their thinking behind adopting a new approach. It all centres on the Global Harmonised System that was designed by the UN to bring consistency to the way different countries classify and label hazardous materials. There is a great short animation on all about this on www.ukfrs.com. Further work is taking place on projects focused on industrial and commercial environment, major incidents and CBRNe. Systemic and cultural change lie at the heart of the National Operational Learning project: this means that the team has to test out its ideas with a small number of fire and rescue services. London, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Hertfordshire and Mid and West Wales are involved in a pilot project. They will be looking at how to record, categorise and share learning from the wide span of incidents that all fire and rescue services attend. And because it is such a big change, the project team will be doing a lot of engagement work and sharing outcomes to embrace other fire and rescue services over the first half of 2017. The team is keen to speak to principal officers about the project, so please contact jturner@ ukfrs.com for more information. Expect to learn more about this project in FIRE over the next few months. Engagement is a massively important part of the programme and intrinsic to its success. Chris Caswell leads on this; he has visited over 30 fire and rescue services across the UK, sharing and inspiring along the way. His visits are revealing how far fire and rescue services have come in
and intrinsic to its success”
considering the guidance and how to make changes at a local level. Chris’s job is to offer support in the direction they wish to take. For example, in Wales all three Welsh fire and rescue services are actively working together as a region to introduce the guidance framework of products across the region. One of the aspects of the programme that Chris is particularly keen on is the development and use of scenarios. A scenario is a compilation of tactical actions from National Operational Guidance relevant to a specific, or a number of similar incident types. Scenarios are structured to support the decision-making process of incident commanders. Scenarios provide a fantastic starting point for adopting the guidance not only locally, but regionally for a truly consistent approach. Events like the Emergency Services Show also help the programme to reach out to a wider audience, often beyond the Fire and Rescue Service. During the two days at the NEC in late September, the team spoke to nearly 300 visitors. They also helped curate the Learning Zone seminar programme, where Doc Holliday, Programme Manager, took part in a tri-service discussion panel about how the blue light services learn and develop. There is a lot going on to make sure the programme successfully concludes its work by March 2018. There are discussions taking place about what will happen to the programme after this date and updates on this will be shared via the programme’s website and other channels over the next few months. Subscribe to the ukfrs.com newsfeed and follow @UKFireandRescue on Twitter to keep up to date. November 2016 | www.fire–magazine.com | 25