Enhancing Interoperability Training: Insights from UK Emergency Responders

Over the past 12 years, JESIP - the team tasked with improving Joint Emergency Services Interoperability across the UK - have sought to promote greater joined-up working between emergency team members through changes to working practices and team training.

Our research evaluated the perceived effectiveness of this training via a survey of 72 emergency responders.

Our findings highlighted five main requirements for effective interoperability team training:

1. Representative and realistic

Participants suggested that training should include the core emergency services in the design; that category 2 responders (for example, utility and transport companies) should be regularly included in this training; and to move away from focussing on major incidents:

"Make it more regular and don't continually provide huge exercises. Little and often is probably best rather than training against a once in lifetime type of incident."

2. Sharing perspectives and developing awareness of capabilities and challenges across teams

65% of participants described how interacting with other services during multi-agency training enabled them to bring together different agency perspectives, which supported decision-making.

Sharing perspectives also helped to build understanding about the different skills and capabilities of multi-agency colleagues, which gave participants confidence in how they might work together in the real-world:

“I also found that gaining insight into other services’ capabilities gave me a much more confident understanding of how best to use them practically”.

3. Prioritised as a core part of the day-job for emergency responders

Participants identified that opportunities to engage with multi-agency training were lacking and not prioritised, often as staff were too operationally busy. To improve joint teamwork, training must be made part of the day job. But participants recognised that this requires centralised buy-in and financing:

“Prioritise and promote joint training sessions - requires significant buy in in terms of time and money” 

4. Face-to-face rather than remote

“We need to move above and beyond just basic classroom training and actually exercise/work better together”.

Participants acknowledged that e-learning can be useful to provide information but it cannot replicate the learning attained from in-person training. Succinctly, one participant responded:

 “More live training sessions, less PowerPoint”.

5. A platform for building social relationships.

A third of participants described how multi-agency training was useful when there was time to build new relationships and connections with other emergency team members. Networking helped to establish a sense of familiarity prior to attending an incident:

“Getting to know other commanders on a personal level - so when it comes to an incident it’s a case of 'How are you?', not 'Who are you?'”

Participants also reflected that this relationship building can occur during training breaks, such as over coffee or lunch, suggesting that building time into training for social interaction is vitally important.

Conclusion

In conclusion, effective interoperability team training needs to be regular, interactive, and in-person, incorporating social learning about team members as a core learning objective.

This will help to build social-psychologically connected teams, thereby enhancing the overall resilience of the team.