A strategy for cooperation in emergency management has been developed and politically agreed upon by the Rogaland County Council, Norway. The region comprised by the strategy consists of many different actors within societal safety and emergency management. The strategy aims at strengthening the existing cooperation, establishing professional centres and further developing competencies in their emergency response efforts within the region. The region has more than twenty road tunnels either in the planning phase, under construction or in operation. The emergency services have established a new organisation of their cooperation to ensure coordination, learning and supervision. This relates both to exercises and real event operations. An important tool in this respect is a recently developed handbook for cooperative exercises. The book is used in planning, execution and follow-up of all cooperation exercises. In this paper we present our newly developed evaluation model for following up the cooperation exercise guidelines, with special attention to events in road tunnels. We employ a learning model that extends the notion of learning from observed changes to also include confirmation and comprehension of cooperation activities.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study how learning within the fire and rescue services may be conceptualized, with special attention paid to tunnel fire safety. Previous studies have developed a model to understand learning in emergency response work. The concept of learning is extended from observed changes in relevant settings to also encompass confirmation of existing knowledge and comprehension of existing practices. We are interested in investigating the properties of the learning model and identifying the mechanisms that influence fire and rescue personnel’s experiences of change, confirmation and/or comprehension.
Design/methodology/approach
This study relies on quantitative data obtained from a questionnaire answered by 939 Norwegian fire and rescue personnel. Multivariate methods have been used to identify the measurement model and the structural relations of the factors.
Findings
The results confirm the theoretical model and indicate that the outcome of learning is influenced by elements of content, context, commitment, decision-making and response and reflection, and that the influence of content and commitment on the outcome of learning is partially indirect and mediated through reflection.
Originality/value
To date, no systematic analysis has been conducted to investigate the factorial structure, as well as the interactions and relationship between the model’s components. This study makes an important contribution to a detailed understanding of learning within the fire and rescue services.
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