Have you ever consider the competencies your ERT need to perform effectively?
The emergency response team (ERT) is a group of people who prepare for and respond to any emergency incident that occurred in the worksite area. ERT in any emergency need some key skills in order to manage emergency event. These include to manage people, organize their own team, and able to command and control situation. Knowledge and skills in responding to emergency can help one organization to close the time-response gap in order to minimize the negative impact came from the emergency event. Theoretical, the bigger response effort will make a small time gap, the smaller time gap – will lesser the loss & damage and subsequently getting a high response success.
By arranging knowledge and skill requirements into few categories, one consultant can develop competency models on what ERT’s need to perform their response task successfully. That is why, to me, before arranging the categories, it is important to get “first hand info” from Training Provider (TP) if I’ve been engage by TP or the company (if direct).
After assessing to their info (documents), and engagement with their HSE in-charge – as a consultant, we can easily determine one’s level. For instance, ERT member should know how their company operate or understand the company procedure. Of cause, as consultant, we need to read the company procedure first & and read it ALL before start the class or asking someone silly question. (remember – no question is stupid question, and no wrong or right answer) Try them, do you have secondary muster station?, what is your call point? what is your time limit to evacuate? etc. This question should be answer correctly by their ERT.
After knowing the level (regardless you know it by your skills or the HSE guy tell you) You have to improvise your module. As a good learning facilitator, you know where to go from here. If you’ve been given 3 days consultancy training. Which skills and what learning module are most important to meet the training objective. (remember – a Learning Facilitator is a change-agent, failing to change them (the ERT) is a failure from the facilitator)
That is why if TP ask me to conduct ERT / ERP (sometimes this thing also they confused) I will ask the PAPER DOCUMENTS – REPORT / RECORDS etc.
Some of the key performance to be a effective ERT is communication. Every member in ERT will communicate to receive or giving order. That is communication internal between ERT. Have you think about giving info to outsider like government agencies, media, next-of-kin, HQ etc. We may think that emergency phase is a short time to manage, we didn’t think on recovery phase, investigation process etc. that require communication data during the emergency phase. Simple question to ask – do you have event logger?
To be a good ERT – Is a process – Not a 3 days Training!
Selecting the ERT (to come over for training), selecting TP (to engage as consultant) is often a significant component to look success in you training matrix or closing audit finding. NO!, if you wrongly pick a workers to become one of ERT (just to attend the training – because company pays a lot, so lets make it fullhouse) your team will not response well during emergency. Same goes with TP – yes, a lot of major player – big name TP is selling this subject. But their have dozen line of trainer that “can talk” about this topic. One can talk about this topic easily – especially the senior trainer … ask them did they have a “feel” to be a change-agent to your ERT?
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