Fireground mistakes prove valuable

Lessons learnt from fire management errors will be used in a university multimedia training package to improve resourcefulness in emergencies.

The University of Queensland led project team wants to improve fire commanders’ adaptability and decision making using case studies of real fires.

The goal is to create a multimedia package with interactive CD and coursebook, which could be taught over two days to fire officers seeking promotions.

Dr Andrew Neal, from UQ’s School of Psychology and Australian Research Council’s Key Centre for Human Factors and Applied Cognitive Psychology will lead the project.

The University of Sydney, Queensland Fire and Rescue Service and NSW Fire and Rural Fire services will collaborate.

Dr Neal said this collaboration would not guarantee that fire services would adopt his training program.

He said the program, Training for adaptability: the role of errors, exceptions and rules of thumb, would help fire commanders size up situations, allocate resources and choose strategies to attack fires.

“We’re trying to develop training programs that enhance adaptive expertise for fire commanders,” Dr Neal said.

“It will expose them to examples of errors that have been made in fire incidents and the consequence of errors.

“The idea is to get people to be thinking more adaptively for unexpected or unusual situations.”

The Federal Government’s research funding body, the Australian Research Council, has provided $599,178 over four years to build and test the program.

Although it concentrates on fire management, Dr Neal said the program could be adapted to other high pressure environments such as surgery.

For more information contact Dr Neal (phone: 3365 6372, email: Andrew@psy.uq.edu.au) or Miguel Holland at UQ Communications (phone: 3365 2619, email: m.holland@uq.edu.au)