Incident action guides : managing risk for a safer community / Dept. of Emergency Services (Queensland Fire and Rescue Service & Business Support Services).

Entrant: Pre-disaster Category, Federal/State Government Stream, Safer Communities Awards 2005.

The Queensland Fire and Rescue Service (QFRS) is the primary provider of fire and rescue services to Queensland communities and in doing so focuses on developing the capacity of the community to prevent, prepare for and lessen the effects of emergencies. It follows that the QFRS statement of purpose is in partnership with the community, create a safer Queensland by providing world-class professional fire and rescue services. QFRS has introduced the Incident Action Guides (lAG), within its Operation Doctrine, to improve the way the organisation can both prevent and manage incidents within the community. A shift in paradigm taken by the organisation was to integrate risk management or the prevention, preparedness, response and recovery model into the design and application of the lAG. This shift underpins the ethos of the document in the following areas: Incident Pre-Planning, Incident Response and Post-Incident Recovery. The lAG provide direction for QFRS personnel to actively engage the community in incident pre-planning to identify local needs, information and knowledge to either prevent an incident from occurring or reduce the impact of an incident if it eventuates. This participation provides numerous benefits for the community (as a whole) and for individual members, such as an increase in knowledge of their roles and responsibilities, increased awareness of the hazards that exist in the community, increased knowledge about how they can prevent or mitigate an event and what immediate actions to perform when an event does arise. The inevitable benefits of QFRS personnel working with the community, other emergency service providers and government agencies in enhancing mutual understanding, developing location specific knowledge and preparedness will be fundamental in preventing and minimising the risk of incidents.