I had the pleasure yesterday of having a long chat with Johnnie Walker. For those that don’t know Johnnie he is Chair of what he considers to be the best ALSAR Unit in the country – Sussex Search and Rescue. He is also a fellow instructor at UKLSI, definately the best lowland search training organisation in the country!
One of the topics of conversation was a review of a search that I did for Sussar. Johnnie felt that having someone who wasn’t there look over the search management paperwork and decisions and giving feedback was and is a extremely beneficial exercise for his Unit. No search is perfect, and even if it was there would be no way to double-check that unless the search is evaluated in some way, so a review helps improve Unit’s procedures, decision making processes and documentation. If nothing else it can help reassure search managers and controllers that they are in fact doing a great job – something that is important when they may sometimes go without a find for months or years.
We both agreed that this is yet another bit of lowland search in the UK that could be improved upon.
Back in 2003 I wrote the original UKLSI search controllers course. Although it has changed immensely since that time, and is a lot better thanks to the efforts of Steve Upton from Wiltshire Search and Rescue, one slide that is still prominent is on search de-briefing. Whilst everyone evaluates the effectiveness of the search of a sector – or at least they better do – there are other types of search de-briefing. One of which is post incident de-briefing; how could we have improved upon this search?
Below I have copied the content of that slide;
Evaluation of each individual search
–To help all involved improve
–Must ensure you have a ‘no-blame’ culture, where things are said constructively etc.
–Important to the development of all teams
How can Units and lowland search in general improve if we are not taking the time to review each search?
Questions like; did our callout procedures work this time? Was the RV suitable? Was the briefing effective? Were the Sectors appropriate? Prioritised correctly? Re-searched where appropraite? Was the search documentation adequate? And so on and so on.
Take the time to look at your Unit’s post SAR incident evaluations. Are they driving improvement in your Unit? If not, maybe its time they did!
