This talk will contain a strong set of visual images and short animations to reinforce content and highlight key concepts. Good morning everyone, my name is Seamus Bradley and I am from the Donegal Mountain Rescue Team in the North West of Ireland. In fact you could say we are a neighbouring team of ICESAR, but we don’t do mutual aid calls!. [Slide to show geographic location of Donegal team area and photos of team in area] We are a volunteer team, 35 members strong and we respond to emergency calls across our county which has an area of approximately 4,850km2. Over the past five years my team has responded to an average of 17 calls per year, so we are not the busiest team in Ireland, nor do we have the highest mountains, but we have a steady flow of incidents in the many remote areas of our county. We work closely with the four volunteer coastguard units in our county because as well as large areas of mountain Donegal has approximately 1100km of coastline which is almost 20% of the total coastline of Ireland. Some of our mountains drop directly into the North Atlantic Ocean. (Slide Changes to illustrate the SAR LAST sequence) Most of us in this room are, no doubt, familiar with the commonly recognised SAR incident phases of Locate, Access, Stabilise and Transport or LAST for short. All of us will have protocols, procedures, pre-plans and paperwork to guide us through each of these phases - but what about the bit between each phase? In my experience it is this transition point that causes the most stress to the incident manager. How well are we prepared for the instant transition from Locate to Access or the change of resource needed to go from Stabilise to Transport? Beyond that how many of us are adequately prepared when things aren’t going to plan? Even the best pre-plan cannot prepare us for the turbulence of dynamic incident management. In this talk I’m going to share some of my experiences with you and explore some techniques that you may find useful in your own operations when the expected incident path becomes an unexpected curveball of chaos. So let us begin with the structure of a SAR Incident. My team uses the nemonic PRLASTD to guide us through the incident stages. (Slide changes to illustrate PRLASTD) P is Prepare and Pre-Plan and is the normal operational state for the team. Training, equipment checks, administrative meetings and fundraising. But then without warning an alert text from the Irish Police, the Irish Coast Guard or our National Ambulance Service. We move into the Response phase - gathering information, evaluating the situation and deciding how to deploy. If this goes smoothly (and I will come back to that point) we move to the Location phase. Location is the phase that sees the laptops running, the radios crackling and the hi-viz jackets start as a large blob around the RV point and then fan away over ridges and behind peaks as they seek, search and It all sounds so calm, so organised, so effective and that’s what my team leader thinks I’m here to tell you all about. But I have been a team leader of two teams in my time, so let me take you back, like I promised to the start of our SAR Incident sequence. That bit where we find ourselves jumping from Prepare to Respond and Respond to Locate. The talk will go on to explore how we can develop reflex tasks to smooth the transition between phases and how we can train our members/responders to recognise these transition points and get ahead of the tasks so that they are ready and waiting. This will be explored through how various sports teams use strategy to pass and receive a ball on the pitch, only in this case the casualty is our ball. The talk will compare how we can apply this thinking to incident management. 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, 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. In conclusion I will offer some basic frameworks and procedures to help build capacity amongst responders to understand how their role and responsibilities change throughout the incident, how they can stay ahead of the casualty and how the team can prepare itself to deal with the turbulence that can disrupt smooth SAR operations.