Crew Resource Management. Jon Politis brought us this concept again at last weekend's very educational Trauma Conference. You can get a GREAT book from Amazon about CRM, click here to check out this book.
One of the big teachings of CRM is Situational Awareness. You know the problem. Things go bad, your focus narrows down to the most serious situation and you miss the "big picture." Your scene becomes tunnel visioned, fixated.
One of the very first incidents that lead to CRM was a plane crash into the Florida Everglades. All of the folks running the Eastern Airlines plane were focused on a burnt out light bulb. No one was flying the plane. The plane crashed and lots of people died.
The aviation industry trains its pilots to anticipate problems and address them in a systematic way. A first step in avoiding loss of situational awareness is to minimize the level of distractions. In the flying world this is referred to as keeping a "sterile cockpit".
This concept is easily transposed to fire department operations. Imagine your next call. You are enroute and the firefighter next to you is yammering on about how he hates his job, he hates his boss; all of this yammering is NOT about the job at hand or the one coming up very shortly. You all arrive and no one has much of a clue of what to do.
Practise this "sterile cockpit" technique from now on. Don't let anyone distract you, others or themselves from the incident at hand.
Next week, I hope to have the link to find Instructor Handouts from the Trauma Conference. Please feel free to comment on this blog site. Does it work for you? Let me know.
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