JESIP meets the challenge of how services can learn from past events.

During the Summer 2015, JESIP held a series of workshops to launch the new Joint Organisational Learning (JOL) arrangements. This was an early objective for JESIP and a key driver for why JESIP was started in the first place.

Services are working together at incidents more and more. It is recognised that generally Emergency Services work together well and many have good multi-agency de-brief procedures in place. However,  there has never been a single central system like JOL before. JOL can allow what has been learnt all over the country to be reviewed centrally and allow us to spot where action could be taken to avoid the same mistakes being made in future.
JOL really is the last part of the Jigsaw and the process is really simple as Brian Welsh, JESIP Senior User leading on JOL explains.

 “It’s just about being able to easily and effectively learn lessons from multi agency incidents, training, testing and exercising which impact on Emergency Services interoperability. In particular we are looking to capture learning which is related to the Joint Doctrine which is primarily the five core principles; the use of METHANE and, the use of the Joint Decision Model (JDM).”

In each service and Local Resilience Forum there is a Single Point of Contact for JOL which the JESIP team will continue to liaise with about JOL. They are responsible for loading up information from their services via the JOL App which is hosted on ResilienceDirect. Services can decide whether they are happy for their information to be published back through the App so that other services can learn from it too, but this only happens once the JESIP team have reviewed the content and potentially taken out any personal or sensitive data. What we aim to do is share the useful information that can make positive a difference on the ground.

The end game is to ensure that learning is identified by services during any multi-agency de-brief and that they will put processes in place to ensure the learning is then recorded onto JOL. Whilst we know it will take time this new approach to become the norm, we are already getting some really useful feedback and seeing some excellent examples of useful ways of solving issues too.

Regular updates about JOL will feature in our newsletter and you can read more about JOL here on our website and download our fact sheet here.

Header picture provided courtesy of Cheshire Fire & Rescue Service