Decisions [D4H] - Product Blog

Mobile Tech Helping Oklahoma Relief Efforts

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:18:19 +0000

Following the devastating tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma, charities are relying heavily on people's generosity to fund their relief efforts. Mobile payment technology or text message based donations coming from the public have made up a huge part of the funds donated.

Upon hearing of the devastation, calls to action were quickly sounded from relief organizations and celebrities alike encouraging text message-based donations to provide aid. When the phone user texts a unique "short code" to the charities custom five-digit telephone number, the charge for the donation is simply added to the customer's bill or deducted from their prepaid balance.

Requests to Text STORM to 80888 to donate $10 to the recovery and relief efforts referencing The Salvation Army's text-to-donate campaign, hit the twittersphere with an almighty roar and the same can be said for Text “REDCROSS” to 90999. In events like Oklahoma and super storm Sandy we get to see that people are inherently good and willing to help.

Threat to charities lifeline
This payment method is a huge benefit to nonprofits, however the underlying technology has come under threat by fraudsters. Regulators are concerned about an activity called “mobile cramming” a practice that uses the technology to add fraudulent charges to consumers' phone bill. This does not affect donation to relief efforts so DON’T WORRY.

This underhanded activity often occurs when people use their numbers to sign up for a service such as horoscopes, ringtones or trivia sent by text without their permission or knowledge, after which they get a stream of messages which bill the recipient. So read the fine print when giving your number to these services.

Hopefully regulators can remedy the problem with double opt-in requirement or obligatory unsubscription notifications. If not the bad apples could upset the cart. Mobile Giving Foundation CEO Jim Manis said "I don't want the philanthropic piece to be negatively tainted and if the premium space goes away, guess what? We go away, too. So there is a threat, if you will, to us,"

Marc Healy - [D4H] Crew

Podcast Episode 33 - Personal Health After an Incident, Surrey SAR and Canada.

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:52:23 +0000

Pop on the kettle, take off the PPE, throw the BSI gloves in the medical bin and sit back and enjoy the premier emergency response chat. Find out more at http://decisions.d4h.org

In this episode, Adam & Robin discuss ways to manage your personal mental health after an incident, The Moore Tornado in Oklahoma, Interview Seamus, a Surrey SAR member and talk about Robin & Marc's recent visit to Canada.

Post Traumatic Stress - Maintaining Health Afterwards

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:30:38 +0000

At the end of a tough shout you eventually have to go home. What ever your home circumstances are, the tough shouts will affect your home life. Here are some tips to helping yourself - though if your feeling like you need help - reach out - as your family deserve you to be in the best condition.

This list is not exhaustive, nor does it constitute a full 360-degree support plan - but it does give some useful advice for what you can do to help yourself.

Reach out - Sounds simple doesn't it? Talking about your problems, thoughts and confusions will let your friends & family know what's going on inside your head, and most importantly it will allow them to help you.

Don't make big life decisions - Of course you wouldn't! Though your brain works in unusual ways. One example could be attending a death of a toddler and then inexplicably getting the need to have a baby with your partner or another one could be going out and spending $100,000 on a sports car because 'you only live once'.

Spend time doing the things that you enjoy - Refreshing and recharging your 'batteries' is important as it will allow you the important time that we all require to get yourself back to 100%.

Avoid drugs and alcohol - Both of these affect your mood in the short and long term and there is a real risk of developing dependence. Don't add a substance abuse problem to the complicated situation you are already in. On top of this you should eat regular and balanced meals while maintaining your exercise program.

Communication, understanding and patience - Your family and friends will experience many aspects of the disaster with you. Really work on keeping the communication lines open and both sides should be patient and understanding of the other.

Managing your response team is the reason we developed Decisions [D4H] to learn more about Decisions [D4H] click here

Adam Scott - EMT & SAR Responder

Source

D4H @ ICESAR - Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:53:17 +0000

Last November a couple of the crew at [D4H] visited Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg or the "Icelandic Search & Rescue Association" known as ICESAR in English for short. We've a lot of [D4H] users in Iceland, and it was a great opportunity to get out on the ice with them in some of their vehicles.

We hadn't gotten around to blogging about this trip yet. Iceland - what a country! These guys have some serious kit, and they need it - the environment is extreme. If you like big trucks, huge trucks, enormous trucks - visit Iceland. The next conference is 2014.

Common incidents in Iceland include all your typical missing person situations, but the technical calls are where it gets interesting. Iceland has large expanses of icecap and glacier that are big tourist and recreational attractions. It's a local pastime to own a big 4x4 and drive up the glaciers.

Some of the more interesting incidents we heard about were cars down crevasses, full vehicle extrications in the ice, and a technical rope access team needed to do it. Blizzards come in fast, and visibility and temperature drop with them. Tourists can become lost or separated and these special vehicles are what's needed.

These 4x4 are the closest things to 'ships on land' we've seen with marine GPS units, laptops mounted on the dashboard, and navigation. Designed for back-county travel with no roads or tracks driving a glacier is much like being at sea.

Facebook for Emergency Response Teams

Fri, 17 May 2013 07:51:26 +0000

As it was Mark Zuckerberg's birthday this week, I decided to take a look at what Facebook resources would benefit response teams. For some this may seem basic but if ordinarily you only use Facebook for personal use there are subtle differences worth knowing.

If all the Facebook users formed a country it would be one of the biggest in the world with a reported 1 Billion monthly active users. We have talked in the past about how social media in general can help publicise your team. But I wanted to talk about some specific features that will help your team reach a small chunk of these 1 Billion users.

Personal v.s. Public accounts

There are many self proclaimed social media gurus, who feel their ability to use facebook to publicise their personal lives makes them experts in all aspects of social media. However as I said there are subtle difference in how to get the most from private accounts versus organization or business accounts. Before you start posting your organization must set out a set of guidelines for use. At it’s most basic this is a list of what can and can’t be posted, but it is worthwhile covering what type of message and tone the organization wants to adopt.

Fan pages - Share your team success with the public

If you’re in a country with english as the first language, Facebook is quick route to a largest proportion of your community. You should create a page (not a personal user profile) and post regular information about your training, incidents, and any press you get.

Many teams only appear to the public in the case of a large disaster, this makes community awareness an issue. It’s a harsh truth but lack of public awareness can affect funding. Posting consistent content featuring what your team is doing behind the scenes to prepare for these worst case scenarios will help build some much needed community support and awareness.

Events - Invite your community

To get the most out of any your fundraising or community awareness events, you can share them with your facebook fans through the use of Facebook events. Your team members can also send out event invites to their own Facebook friends, extending the reach of your event. With the events feature you can get a nice idea of how many people are expected at the event as people can choose attendance options (Yes,No,Maybe) you can also share updates and details of the event.

Share content - Blog posts

It's worth registering a domain name for your team and pointing it to a blog or other news content management system that allows comments. Blogs are good to hold an archive of all your incident news, training, announcements, and other posts. If you use a blogging engine you should find an option to auto-post it to your Facebook Page so you'll only have to post to one location. Why turn on comments? If there's going to be any controversy, you want it to happen on your property where you control the conversation.

Content format - Share content with photos

Facebook is all about photos and I recommend you post a photo for each item with the news you want to share in the caption. Facebook ranks photos better than plain links to external sites as they would prefer you to stay on their site, because of this links tend to go to a smaller proportion of your audience.

Marc Healy - [D4H] Emergency Response Team Software Crew

Improving emergency response teams is why we built Decisions [D4H] click here to learn more.

D4H @ Canada Task Force 2 (CA-TF2)

Mon, 13 May 2013 16:27:09 +0000

CA-TF2 have been using Decisions [D4H] for a few years now. We took the chance to visit their USAR warehouse recently in Calgary.

The CA-TF2 USAR Warehouse is incredible. Millions of dollars of equipment, ready to deploy within a few hours notice to disasters anywhere in Canada. All the equipment can be loaded into military planes or travel by trucks. Their mobile field hospital and workshop truck is a double decker Incident Command Vehicle with massive internal space. Enjoy the photos below, which include photos of the equipment cache, training aids, and trench rescue. We've published the full album on our Facebook.

Continue to Full Album

Announcing: Incident History of Persons Involved

Thu, 02 May 2013 15:35:16 +0000

If you work in a commercial or industrial setting, the persons involved in your incidents are probably contained to the same group of people be they employees, site contractors, or clients. Rather than just referencing a name, you're now able to select the same person involved as a victim, witness, suspect, or calling party across multiple incidents to build up a history of the incidents they were involved in.

"What was the incident our contractor Peter Smith was involved in last month?"

"How many times has Jane Johnson pressed STOP button and set off our alarm?"

"Did Paula Deane ever get injured while on-site?"

These are the questions lots of you have to answer. Previously you needed to look up the incident by date, now you can find the incident by the person involved.

From today we're announcing the ability to switch-on 'Repeat Persons Involved' allowing you to select the same person involved on multiple incidents. This is designed for teams who are tracking incidents involving the same group of persons involved such as employees, contractors, or clients.

Your incident might be at a petrochemical facility, in a care home, or on a factory floor - you'll now be able to select the person involved from an auto-complete drop-down of names of previously entered persons. If one doesn't exist, just type to create it new. Persons might be victims, witnesses, suspects, or the calling party who reported the incident.

If you've previously added contact details or information such as date of birth about this person we'll quickly auto-fill all the fields for you saving you time.

You'll find a new menu option to locate the persons involved browser where you can search or browse by individual person involved by name.

The Persons Involved browser has a search function, and alphabetic listing. We've also smart lists on the left that will allow you filter by the role they played in their involvement.

Clicking on a person will bring up their incident involvement history. You can query this data by tag (type of incident) or by date range to look at how they were involved throughout the year.

Click into an incident to see the specific involvement, demographics, injuries, and a snapshot of the contact details you had at the time of the incident.

As is usual, we'd love feedback in the comments below - we'll respond to everybody. To switch on, as the account owner, go to [Team Settings] -> [Persons Involved] -> [Repeat Persons]. This feature is off by default, and we're still building some advanced features such as merge and unlink tools.

The browser, search, and involvement listings are only visible to Member+, but the anonymous person involved reports are visible to all members - with the secure data redacted (see padlocks in screenshot above) for those without the correct viewing permissions.

Getting the most from [D4H] - Creating Qualification Expectations

Wed, 01 May 2013 17:22:49 +0000

Your [D4H] emergency response team is full of methods to optimize your personnel tracking. One such useful function is 'Expectations' - you can create a group such as 'Team Leaders' and make it mandatory that all members of that group have a certain qualification - for example, 'Incident Management.

Firstly you need to create a group called 'Team Leaders' and a qualification called 'Incident management'. Once those are created, simply go to the qualification and click on the [Expectations] button on the right and you can choose what group members that qualification is mandatory for.

To find out more about the Decisions [D4H] just click here

Developer at [D4H] - Hiring PHP / Javascript

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:53:44 +0000

Decisions [D4H] is a multi-award winning emergency response team management technology experiencing rapid growth around the world. Our international operation has had particular success and we are firmly committed to growing our capacity. We are now looking for another ambitious engineer to join our crew in the lighthouse - yes, we work in a lighthouse.

What You'll Be Working On...

Primary responsibilities include the development of our existing product with responsibility for implementing enhancements to current functionality, security, and service levels. You will interact daily with emergency responders all over the world in an Engineering role as escalated by Customer Success. Your role will focus on designing, building, deploying and maintaining an exceptional product and service driven by customer requests.

What Do You Require...

We expect you to have examples of past web applications you built using PHP, MySQL, and Javascript. You should be able to talk about these examples in detail and describe the design decisions, technologies used, mistakes made and lessons learnt.

We like people who can learn fast, and you'll be expected to quickly become competent in Redis, jQuery, Knockout.js, Apache, Git, and many other tools.

Preference is given to those who can primarily work out of our offices in the Baily Lighthouse, Howth, Co. Dublin, Ireland. Exceptional remote candidates may be considered.

What We Believe In...

- Outcomes, not incomes: Success is measured by tangible human outcomes. The code you write will actually save lives - this is not a common opportunity. We ship insanely great stuff.

- Connections, not transactions: We encourage networking, co-creation, and collaboration. We champion the front-line responder by providing an incredibly deep and engaging technology experience for them.

- Creativity, not productivity: We create new value, not shift around the old. We work out of an actual lighthouse in Dublin Bay - come and see our creative culture for yourself. Don't forget your camera - the sunrise is awesome.

- People, not product: We invest in people and always give real responsibility. Our weekly 'Beer Call' is an open forum for sales, engineering, business, and international contacts to review and question the weeks activities. You better like buffalo wings too.

Applications...

The position is required immediately. Applicants should send an introduction email with their CV or other considerations to robin.blandford@d4h.org using the subject line "Save more lives".

Don't miss our office webcam!

Google Glass for Emergency Response

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:19:47 +0000

The much anticipated Google Glass has been bestowed upon a few lucky candidates. With a release to the public expected in 2014, we examine their potential uses for emergency response.

The product is still being tinkered with by some lucky developers, so all features haven’t been finalised. As I was not lucky enough to get my hands on one of the early release ‘Explorer Editions’ I have gathered my information from some reliable sources.

Translate your voice
A problem responders face, is the inability to communicate with a member of the public in distress. A language barrier can increase the difficulty of dealing with a callout, Google Glass could bring an end to this problem. Although Google's existing product Google Translate is not perfect and one can assume similar technology will be used in Google Glass, a rough translation is certainly a better alternative than a blank stare.

Taking photos in a wink
With Google Glass, you'll be able to take 5MP photos and 720P videos. This offers a quick and easy method for taking photo evidence that can later be added to an incident report. The ability to seamlessly record response activities can offer huge reassurance and support if response activities are questioned.

Share what you see. Live
Coming from the Google + Hangouts technology, this feature would allow incident command to see what the responders are seeing as it happens. Increasing incident intelligence and allowing for the delivery of commands that are better suited to the situation. Lets hope the quality is high as I have found Hangouts to be a poor mans Skype.

Directions right in front of your eyes
The inclusion of some famous buildings floor plans in Google Maps, leads me to speculate (because the temptation is killing me) that the miniature supercomputer by your eye will possess the ability to direct you through buildings. Although there are some similar offerings on the market currently. A mainstream super user friendly option has to be a mouthwatering proposition to many responders. The ability to get quick and easy directions also has great potential for helping SAR response.

Ask Google
Lets not forget that you will also have the ability to ask Google simple questions, retrieve images from search and altogether tap into the vast amounts of knowledge Google puts within everyones grasp. I believe Google have limited the amount of commands that the Glass will recognise, which I can understand as they want to avoid a Siri senario, where voice commands are often frustratingly inaccurate.

If you want to see a full list of specs click here. Putting response improving technology in the hands of responders is the reason we made Decisions [D4H] click here to learn more.

Marc Healy - [D4H] Emergency Response Team Software Crew

A Shared Response Team Address Book

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:44:15 +0000

Today we've upgraded all user accounts to include an Address Book to store the shared contact details of personnel from the resources that work with your organization and the companies that service you. Track involvement of these personnel at events, training exercises, and incidents. Store phone numbers, email addresses, and contact notes against their online profile so their details are never far away when you're in the field.

Having the names and contact details of the personnel and employees of the companies and resources you work with always to hand is very important. We've designed the [D4H] Address Book to give you a central location to store & retrieve information.

Shared Address Book

Your Address Book is shared amongst all members, so when anyone on your team with permission to edit data adds a new contact, you'll all benefit from it. We automatically list all resources within your account, allowing you to add personnel to them. We've also added a new entity called a Company which allows for things like 3rd party suppliers, maintenance and servicing staff to be recorded without them being listed as resources.

Search & Filter Contacts

You'll quickly discover our alphabetical listing of contacts and notice that we automatically import all your members past & present so you can quickly include them in a search for a name or number. Use the filter box on the top left to very quickly shortlist the results presented to you.

Contact Details

Each contact may be a member of one or more companies / resources for which you can add contact details. Contact details include email, phone numbers, contact notes, position held, etc. You can click through to the profile from anywhere you list the member, including as involved at an activity.

Track Event, Incident, and Exercise Involvement

You'll find a new section on the resources module of the incident, exercise, and event report forms for personnel. Use the drop-down to select the personnel who attended from the resource. You may also quickly create a new contact by pressing that button. Click on the name on the left in yellow to add contact details and quick-edit their profile. In the large text box, you can note their involvement in the activity.

Query Involvement Data

We've built-in a tool, click [View All Involvement], so you can see their involvement with your team between the date ranges and tags you wish to query. This will allow you do things like see when a certain person last visited, serviced, or inspected something for you - or maybe the last time they were on an incident with you.

The Future

At present, all contact details are shared with your entire team and we'd like feedback on how you'd like to permission this data e.g. restrict member access. We hope to be able to let you create Contact Lists in the future allowing you to send SMS / Emails etc. at these sender groups. We'd also like to see some sync functionality to handsets and other devices.

How Do Get Started?

If you have an account, it's already live - enjoy! You'll find this feature in [Planning] -> [Address Book], we've switched in on by default for you. You may switch off the Address Book module within your [Team Settings] if you do not wish to use it.

If you do not have a Decisions [D4H] account you should download a free information pack.

Getting the most from [D4H] - Issuing Equipment To A Member

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:51:56 +0000

Issuing equipment to a member of your emergency response team is a normal, everyday task. It's a pain to document this with a spreadsheet or on paper records but Decisions [D4H] makes it very easy. Adam our customer success lead talks us through how to issue a piece of equipment to a member.

First of all you need to go to the item of equipment that you wish to assign to a member. Simply click your way through the software as usual.

Once you are on the Item's page - as seen below - simply click [Update Details].

You then need to just scroll down the page and select [Issued Equipment] and assign it to a member. If this option does not appear just click [Advanced Options] all the way down the bottom of the page.

Now you can either click on a member profile to see what equipment has been issued to a member or you can see it on the item view page.

To find out more about the Decisions [D4H] Equipment Manager just click here .

Strategic Planning During An Incident.

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:00:24 +0000

There is a huge amount of literature and thought on strategic planning for business and nearly as much on emergency response. The most notable difference between strategic planning for business vs emergency response situations is that the emergency response situations usually require quicker actions and the 'scene' is more dynamic - this means our methods have to be very flexible and quickly adaptable.

The process I find useful is "Situation-Target-Path-Act". It's a simple term to remember but is none the less useful, practical and may be a lifesaver.

Situation - You first need to evaluate the situation you're presented with. Figure out the main contributing factors to the incident you are trying to deal with. This could be anything from affected area/person, hazards and also knowing what assets you have at your disposal.

Target - Figure out what the main objective of this emergency response is. Is it containment, mitigation and/or rescue?

Path - Define the route to the completion of the situation you are trying to deal with.

At this point you have a knowledge of what you are dealing with, know your capabilities and limitations as well as having a route to completing your tasking. The final point is:

Act - You can have done as much preparation, planning and defining as you wish but the most important part is to act. You don't want to have 'inaction by planning' being a factor in your emergency response.

Documenting protocols, recording incidents and training in an open and collaborative environment is one of the reasons we built Decisions [D4H] - Multi-Award Winning Emergency Response Team Software.

Written by Adam Scott, [D4H] Customer Success Dept, EMT & SAR Responder

Announcing Extra Weather with Tides, Snow Conditions, Avalanche Risk, Water & Air Temperature

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:19:32 +0000

We've added the ability to customize and switch on-off weather adding Tides, Snow Conditions, Avalanche Risk, Water Temperature, and Air Temperature to our existing Conditions, Visibility, Wind, Sea State, Sea Swell, and Cloud Base weather reporting options. Take a read and watch the video below to see how it works.

Video Overview

Watch this 45 second YouTube video for the quickest overview of how this works, then scroll down to read the details. You'll find all these options in [Team Settings] which you need to be the Account Owner to access.

Customizable Weather

You can now select the exact elements of weather that you want to record, or simply switch-off the weather module entirely - which may be of benefit to indoor response teams, or where weather has no significant impact.

Tide

For each day of your incident, we'll now add a tide form letting you record High Water & Low Water times twice a day. To add or remove days from the tide just extend or reduce the dates of your incident. You can record the tide in either metric (m) or imperial (ft) which will be determined based on your main measurements setting.

Snow Conditions

You can now select from any of the following Snow Conditions on the mountain 'Powder', 'Packed Powder', 'Hard Pack', 'Loose Granular', 'Frozen Granular', 'Wet Packed Snow', 'Wet Granular', 'Wet Snow', 'Windblown Snow', 'Variable Conditions', 'Bare or Thin', 'Corn', 'Icy'.

Avalanche Risk

We've done our best to work a system that is compatible to both North American & European measurements. The following avalanche risk options are available, 'Low', 'Moderate / Limited', 'Considerable / Medium', 'High', 'Extreme / Very High'.

Air Temperature

Air temperature units recorded depending on your metric or imperial setting at team level. Either in Celsius or Fahrenheit options are available. Leave it blank if you've no measurement.

Water Temperature

Water temperature units recorded depending on your metric or imperial setting at team level. Either in Celsius or Fahrenheit options are available. Leave it blank if you've no measurement.

We're hoping to enable automatic retrieval and form-fill with your local weather conditions as an optional extra in the near future.

*Note: PDF Printed Reports & Analytics haven't been updated yet as we're working on adding all the new content to them in a single future release.

Podcast Episode 32 - Mass Casualty Incident, Showing Compassion and Interview with SAR Volunteer.

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:20:09 +0000

Pop on the kettle, take off the PPE, throw the BSI gloves in the medical bin and sit back and enjoy the premier emergency response chat. Find out more at http://decisions.d4h.org

In this episode, Adam and Robin discuss discuss Multi Casualty Incidents in the wake of the Boston Bombing, Talk about showing compassion to your fellow responders and talk to Kyle who is a search and rescue volunteer in Canada.

Creating A Framework for Mass Casualty Incidents.

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:58:27 +0000

In the wake of the terrible atrocity that happened at the Boston marathon, you may be thinking that your organization requires an update/creation of a process to deal with a mass casualty incident (MCI). If you don't know about triaging a mass casualty incident, you may find this useful to help you understand what the emergency services do at a large scale incident. Instead of giving you a complete 'how to' we will supply you with some useful points to think about. We have purposely referenced already available sources, so you can do a full study on 'best practice' for your organization. Throughout this article remember - 'Tag, Treat, Transfer'

To build the bones of your MCI protocol you must first define the triage process as relevant to your area and your responders skill level. The triage process is intended to assign a level of priority to each patient at the sharp end of pre-hospital care. Your responders should follow their clinical practice guidelines (CPG's) in denoting what 'priority' each patient is. A good example of a CPG process that we found online, is taken from the "Charlevoix County Medical Control AuthorityState Model { CBRNE } Protocol"

This process is usually done by the first EMT's or Fire Fighters who arrive on scene. It must be remembered that this is a dynamic, quick and tough process. The responder(s) should asses each casualty as per their CPG's and tag appropriately. Minimum time should be given to each patient so as all can be tagged accordingly. No treatment should be given at this stage, as this wastes triage time.

After all patients have been 'tagged' appropriately and other responders are on scene you can now provide essential treatment depending on your responders skill level. You may have to provide treatment at the site or create a treatment area similar to the the one belwo which was described in "Establishing a Mass Casualty Management System".

Evacuation should be done via the most appropriate means for the appropriate patients. Simply put, get the most serious ones to the hospital as quickly as possible. Another consideration is to initiate a 'one-way system' so all ambulances will travel in one direction. Your MCI protocol can be as simple or as complicated as your response area requires. Just remember "Tag, Treat & Transfer".

Documenting protocols, recording incidents and training in an open and collaborative environment is one of the reasons we built Decisions [D4H] - Multi-Award Winning Emergency Response Team Software.

Written by Adam Scott, [D4H] Customer Success Dept, EMT & SAR Responder

Leading your Organization? Remember to have Compassion

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:56:02 +0000

‘Compassion is the understanding or empathy for the suffering of others’ Presuming it wasn’t an accident that propelled you to the top of your field I’m sure you have put in a lot of time, effort and a certain amount of networking. With all this endeavour to succeed have you lost your compassion?

As responders it is expected that compassion be in your nature. However is it possible that by the time you get to a position of power the struggle to succeed has diminished your empathy with employees and the public you swore to protect. Below are some tips that may help rekindle your compassion and empathy for others.

1. Assume the best in others. If a fellow responder wants to turn right when you want to turn left, it isn't always that they are unmotivated or disorganized. Most likely, they simply have goals, pressures, and experiences that differ from yours.

2. Understand what makes them tick. If you want to develop strong working relationships, you need to humanize others by understanding their background, dreams, job objectives and obstacles

3. Serve their needs. You have to help others before you can ever expect that they will help you. Go the extra mile and do the unexpected extras. Make sure they see their reflection in your leadership agenda.

4. Accept responsibility. When problems arise, look in the mirror rather than out the window. This will allow you to make small, relatively private adjustments rather than large, public apologies.

Even if we can't count it, we all know compassion is real. We've all felt its power and influence. We also know there is more to achieving success with our response team than training, planning and creating objectives. Where do these paths cross? People, so look after them!

Managing your response team is the reason we developed Decisions [D4H]. To learn more about Decisions [D4H] download an information pack click here.

Marc Healy - [D4H] Emergency Response Team Software Crew

How To Add Equipment to your Decisions [D4H] Account.

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:50:45 +0000

Every second week, we are going to produce a video which shows you how to achieve certain task on [D4H]. As Decisions [D4H] is so intuitive, they will normally be between 1-2 minutes long. This week focuses on how to add equipment.

Remembers if you need any further information just drop our support team an email via support@d4h.org and they would be happy to answer all of your questions no matter how big or small.

Having an open and collaborative environment is one of the reasons we built Decisions [D4H] - Multi-Award Winning Emergency Response Team Software.

Written by Adam Scott, [D4H] Customer Success Dept, EMT & SAR Responder

Getting The Most From Your Training Session.

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:02:19 +0000

As emergency responder skills are usually done as a system or parallel in the 'real world' - It is important to have training session scenarios that reflect this as much as possible. It is important to prioritize certain skills on training session scenarios, so you can be assured of the required competence and have a 'followable' framework for your responders.

It can be hard to design a good training session that encompasses many skills but does not turn into a general skill session or become focused on just one skill. Hitting the balance on the appropriate time spent on each skill on a training session scenario can be hard. For example, take an EMS scenario on a car crash;

Assess the scene,
Assess patients, make interventions,
Liaise with fire crew on extraction,
Extract,
Get patient into ambulance,
Go to hospital, make handover.

That is a lot of skills to go through; the best way to ensure you get the most from your training scenario time is to split your 'critical session learning points' under 3 headings;

THE BIG ONE - Above all else, what is the number one skill you want improved during this session?

THE MEDIUM THREE - What are the three skills you wish to see worked on that are just not quite as important as THE BIG ONE?

THE SMALL FIVE - Take 5 smaller skills that you want to see improved but that don't fit under the headings above.

Here is a sample card that you could use to grade your responders;

Having an open and collaborative environment is one of the reasons we built Decisions [D4H] - Multi-Award Winning Emergency Response Team Software.

Written by Adam Scott, [D4H] Customer Success Dept, EMT & SAR Responder

6 Tips For Emergency Response Problem Solving

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 07:30:11 +0000

Responders face problems on a daily basis. It’s how we deal with these problems and move on regardless of their size or complexity, that shapes our success. Unfortunately there isn’t any one size fits all approach to problem solving as circumstances will always vary.

I have however put together a few tips that have helped me in the past.

1. Accept the problem. It could be a training session going wrong or equipment malfunctioning regardless acceptance is the first step responders must go through when running into problems. When you accept the problem exists, you can direct your energy fully to solving the problem and stop putting energy into “feeding it”. Now “it” simply exists you can start applying the cure.

2. Ask yourself: What’s the worst that can happen? If you over think or make a snap judgement you will blow the problem out of proportion doubling it in size. A panic judgment can cause unnecessary resources to be used or even the public to be unnecessarily frightened. By asking the question what’s the worst that can happen? with an optimistic frame of mind a responder can restore the problem to it’s original size.

3. Study up. Information about your problem can not only aid you in your recovery but will often decrease the anxiety we face when we are challenged. Knowledge wipes away the clouds of fear around a problem. When dealing with a large incident, the more knowledge you have the more confident you will be to give instruction to fellow responders.

4. Ask for help. Responders often feel asking for help shows a lack of knowledge or competency. However you don't have to solve every problem on your own. You can ask people for advice on what to do and what they did in similar situations, you can also ask for more practical help.

5. Break down the problem. Solving a problem can seem overwhelming when looking at it from a distance. To decrease your anxiety break the problem down into digestible pieces. Then figure out a practical solution to take for each of those little pieces. This approach may not solve the whole problem immediately. But it will reduce the size of the overall issue.

6. Use Parkinson’s Law. This law says that a task will expand in time and complexity depending on the time you set aside for it. For example, if you say to yourself that you’ll come up with a new training exercise within a week then the task or problem will seem to grow to fill that space. Focus your time when finding solutions, then for example give yourself a day instead of that whole week you were thinking of. This will force your mind to focus on solutions and action.

Managing your response team is the reason we developed Decisions [D4H]. To learn more about Decisions [D4H] download an information pack click here.

Marc Healy - [D4H] Emergency Response Team Software Crew