LITIGATION / ENQUIRES / COMPLAINTS

Any organisation involved with people in an emergency situation, particularly the larger incident, needs to keep comprehensive, contemporaneous managerial records. This is also a duty placed on organisations by the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and set out in detail in Chapter 4 of Emergency Response and Recovery.

One of the issues that the organisation needs to take on board is that the possibility of litigation is always present after the event is over. People who are involved in the emergency as patients or victims will be approached by agencies willing to seek legal redress on their behalf. Part of that legal redress may be to question the competence of the rescuers and the organisations that employed them.

If, during their investigations, it is discovered that the organisation has limited or inadequate records of the actions of its staff and managers, the organisation may find itself with few defences to rebut claims made.

Even if there are no financial claims made against the organisation, there will undoubtedly be an enquiry into the emergency, at various levels of importance and involvement, possibly up to and including a full public enquiry. In any enquiry, inquest, or for producing internal reports, the records of the incident team, role holders and others in a management capacity, will be needed. It will be necessary to substantiate the information received during the incident on which decisions and actions were based.

To enable organisations to provide such records, the Emergency Incident Record Book© (EIRB)© has been developed. Similar in layout and contents to the well known and widely used Emergency Log Book© but with fewer pages and a soft cover, it is intended as an incident specific book, where the Emergency Log Book© would normally be used for a duty officer/manager’s log over a period of weeks/months, though it could also be used for an incident.

Each EIRB© is itself numbered and each page in each book is sequentially numbered. The organisation’s managers can easily assemble all the books related to an incident after the event, confident that the records available are as full as possible, contemporaneous, and that no allegation can be raised that pages may have been deleted. With both signatures and initials of the participants contained in the book, a clear and definitive legal record can be provided for any report, enquiry or court process.

In the event of a complaint or comment about one person’s actions at a specific incident, the EIRB© should clearly show, to the respective manager investigating that complaint, the detail necessary to deal adequately with the complainant. It is also vital that any record made is permanent and that it is filed away securely as a definitive record.

The EIRB© is designed as a permanent record and will be filed away in secure storage for at least 7 years.

Protect the organisation, and your managers, by insisting on contemporaneous records being produced for any large scale incident where they attend, using the newly developed Emergency Incident Record Book©

Note - The contents of this book may be open to an application under the Freedom of Information Act though the exemptions allowed under that Act could be claimed for specific items. The contents of the book will also be open in any inquiry, inquest or other court process, though applications to withhold sensitive or other specific items from scrutiny may be granted by the Judge, Coroner or inquiry Chair on application.