Situational Awareness for Emergency Response

By Richard B. Gasaway, PhD

Situational awareness is more complex than simply noticing what is happening around you. An emergency responder must capture clues and cues in the emergency environment, make sense of the information, and predict what will happen next.

In Situational Awareness for Emergency Response, Richard Gasaway establishes the foundation of decision making and the role of situational awareness in high-risk public safety environments. He explains his original research on command decisions and the barriers that challenge a commander's situational awareness, and offers lessons learned and best practices that can assist responders in preventing or overcoming the situational awareness barriers.

Situational Awareness for Emergency Response is an ideal resource for incident commanders, line personnel who make high-stress decisions, and students learning to develop and maintain situational awareness.

Features and benefits:

• Realize how decisions are made in high-stress, high-consequence, and time-compressed situations
• Understand situational awareness and its role in making good and bad decisions
• Identify barriers that challenge a commander's situational awareness
• Improve your decision making with the lessons learned and recommended best practices
• Use the 25-point checklist as an incident evaluation tool to improve safety

Contents:

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I: Decision making and situational awareness
• Introduction
• Traditional decision-making process
• Recognition-primed decision-making process
• Situational awareness
• Situational awareness research
• Part II: Barriers to commander situational awareness
• Staffing
• Communications
• Physical and mental stress
• Workload management
• Human factor
• Attention management
• Command support
• Data and information management
• Mission and goals
• Mental model
• Command location
• Teamwork
• Part III. Lessons & best practices
• Lessons for first responders
• Fireground command best practices
• 25-Point command health check-up
• Epilogue