Incident Command: Tales from the Hot Seat

Kevin Arbuthnot is Deputy Chief Fire Officer of the West Yorkshire Fire Service. As Director of Operations he leads the team which devised and implemented the West Yorkshire Incident Command System. Subsequently, invited by the Home Office to join the 'Safe Person Concept' project, this was adapted into a command system for the whole UK fire service and published as a Fire Service Manual at the beginning of 1999. He is currently developing work in the area of assessment of competence to command. He lectures on incident command widely, including to the Brigade Command Course at the Fire Service College and is the lead officer on incident command issues for the Chief and Assistant Chief Fire Officers Association in the UK. Rhona Flin (BSc, PhD Psychology) is Professor of Applied Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. She is a Chartered Psychologist, a Fellow of the British Psychological Association and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She studied at Aberdeen University, worked there as a Research Fellow on eyewitness memory then spent eleven years lecturing in industrial psychology at Aberdeen Business School. For the last twelve years she has directed a team of psychologists working with high reliability industries (especially energy sector) on research and consultancy projects concerned with the management of safety and emergency response. The group are currently working on projects relating to aviation safety (funded by EC and CAA), leadership and safety in offshore management (funded by HSE and the oil industry), team skills and emergency management (funded by the nuclear industry), and anaesthetists' non-clinical skills (funded by SCPMDE). Her recent books include Incident Command: Tales from the Hot Seat (edited with Arbuthnot, Ashgate, in press); Sitting in the Hot Seat: Leaders and Teams for Critical Incident Management (Wiley, 1996), Managing the Offshore Installation Workforce (edited with Slaven, PennWell Books, 1996) and Decision Making under Stress (edited with Salas, Strub and Martin, Ashgate, 1997).