-The Emergency Services Safety Fraternity-
Emergency Service Just Culture expert Paul LeSage defines a high-consequence organization as one in which “…operations are one human error or at-risk behaviour away from causing harm.” Certainly, Emergency Services are such organizations.
Aviation has long been viewed as a leader in safety systems that acknowledge risk and value a Just Culture. The International Civil Aviation Organization has blueprinted its industry-specific safety management system with the cooperation of a myriad of agencies working in concert, recognizing that all civil aviation companies both contribute to and benefit from shared knowledge.
The safety culture and practices of aviation have been embraced by other high-consequence industries that experience the benefit of clear communication, near miss reporting, accurate data collection and incident analysis. Organizations who share similar risks, equipment, processes and operating locations with one another can benefit from industry-wide safety management much as aviation has undertaken to do.
Emergency response agencies have historically innovated across industries, using aviation approaches, pit-crew strategies, military influenced approaches, and manufacturing efficiencies. We find factors that align us with other industries, and capitalize on the discoveries of those industries.
As emergency services move to embrace Just and Safety Cultures and write these into policy, the similarity of the challenges faced by policing, firefighting and medical response agencies become obvious. These are all agencies in which operating procedures are carefully crafted, painstakingly taught and rehearsed, and occasionally abandoned in a single moment.
Our policy provides instructions to be applied in situations that may also demand unquestioning adherence to orders that depart from those policies, and further may compel independent deviation from procedure when necessary. How do we capture in policy something that is best characterized as: “always do this unless we tell you to do something different or, absent of direction, you determine that it’s best to do something else”? And how do we expect personnel to achieve something so challenging when the unspoken caveat is this: “….and make sure to be right.”
In industries where we answer to legislation, government oversight, regulatory bodies, boards, ministries and watchdog agencies, we are not even in the driver’s seat when it comes to official declarations about who was right once the dust has settled. We are, for better or for worse, married to rulings and consequences externally imposed on our agencies and staff. We don’t want our staff to be risk averse to avoid culpability for diverging from procedure. Likewise, we don’t want personnel to play fast and loose with procedures that were carefully crafted for their protection, and the benefit of those they serve. It’s a lot to demand of humans- people who invariably bring their individuality to the circumstance.
Policy is the place where we articulate our expectations. A Just Culture is the milieu we promise in that policy. It is not free of consequence, but rather recognizes the competing demands employees face, and emboldens them to make good choices, and to learn from mistakes. Policy in a Just Culture is a singular opportunity to equip our humans for super-human tasks, and is the place where we promise that responsible behaviour is a requirement that will not be internally evaluated by its unforeseeable results. It is where, as organizations, we promise to deconstruct events not for the purpose of assigning blame, but to identify risk such that fewer and fewer outcomes will be unforeseeable in the future.
Like civil aviation, emergency services are a fraternity who stand to benefit from shared wisdom and experience as we expand our safety improvements beyond easy fixes and into improved cultures and a new era of safety. Just Policy is a place for us to share those ideas.
Policy Alchemy 