In this presentation, Seamus Bradley will use the familiar LAST framework of Locate, Access, Stabilise and Transport to explore how to plan for, and manage the phase transitions from Locate to Access, Access to Stabilise and Stabilise to Transport.  Quite often it is these transition points that create the most stress for the incident manager, especially when the real world starts throwing curveballs such as changing weather, resource availability or technical failures that disrupt even the best set pre-plans.

The talk will seek to offer some concepts from other disciplines such as team sports and aviation that could be applied to SAR operations and how these might be integrated into incident management.  The development of reflex tasks to smooth these phase transitions will be examined and some ideas offered as to how we can train our members/responders to recognise these transition points and get ahead of the tasks so that they are ready for the operational transition from locate to access, access to stabilise and stabilise to transport.

The second half of the talk will explore managing turbulence in incidents.  Turbulence in this context is defined as anything which upsets or disrupts our normal incident path.  This could be a low turn out of responders, weather, simultaneous multiple incidents or an incident within an incident (team member injury).  I will explore how the incident manager must pre-think responses to these disruptors and will explore how again we can prepare for them and train our members to understand required actions and build their capacity to respond to the unexpected.