How Australian fire and rescue service personnel would like to improve their decision-making learning and training programs
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Effective management of the response to an incident or emergency event is critically dependent on the decision-making skills of incident and emergency management (IEM) personnel. In a series of workshops conducted in 2022 by Natural Hazards Research Australia, priorities were identified that specified future needs for the practice and training of IEM decision-making. The research in this paper contributes to the understanding of how to address these priorities by considering the views of a sample of fire and rescue service personnel about their agency’s current decision-making training program and aspects to improve. This paper provides findings from 34 semi-structured interviews with fire and rescue services personnel in Australia. The sample comprised 29 men and 5 women. Participants worked in rural fire services (n=17), urban fire services (n=9) and State Emergency Services (n=8). The findings suggest that there is need for greater training focus on emergency management decision-making, greater use of exercise-based training activities, a formal approach to mentoring and coaching staff development programs and mandatory refresher courses and review exercises to maintain incident management skills. Australian fire and rescue services agencies need to ensure they are taking a strategic and holistic approach to emergency management learning and development programs.
DOI: 10.47389/41.4.51
Institution: Natural Hazards Research Australia
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7223106145