A Performance Review of Operations (PRO) may be carried out after any incident or training exercise, but one must be held after every incident where a person is reported or trapped, or where extra fire engines need to attend.
A Performance Review of Operations (PRO) sees the Incident Commander, Monitoring Officer and crews meet at the end of an incident to discuss the equipment, actions and procedures used. They consider what worked well, and what could be improved.
For larger incidents, where four or more fire engines attend, a formal PRO is needed. It must take place within 28 days of the incident, and is arranged by the Station Commander at the scene, but to ensure fairness, it’s chaired by another Station Commander.
As well as highlighting areas for improvement, PROs are used to identify good practice where people, equipment and processes have performed well.
In all incidents and training events where six or more fire engines attend, a Performance Review of Command (PRC) is carried out. This type of review evaluates the command and control function of an incident, rather than the firefighting. It’s attended by the officers who were present.
They discuss if, and how, the various teams involved were brought together, and whether they were used in the right way.
Our Incident Monitoring Process Database (IMPD) is a computer database that captures information on incidents, exercises, and performance reviews.
Anyone can add information about an incident to IMPD, but it’s usually an officer. The information added goes through to the incident command team, and then to the relevant subject matter expert.
There are quarterly reviews of the data in IMPD that highlight any trends. So if particular issues with procedure or equipment keep occurring, training can be improved, and new equipment bought.
These trends will also be reported in Operational News – a publication used to inform operational staff about key issues, new procedures and equipment, and provide signposting to training.