Question 6: How do you develop situational awareness skills in new recruits when they have been “programmed” to react instead of respond in the academy?
Chief Gasaway: I’m not completely sure I fully understand the difference between react and respond though I suspect the difference was crystal clear in the mind of this question’s author. As I noted at the start of the webcast, a person who develops a deep knowledge of a subject is in a favorable position to be a resilient problem solver.
I believe every academy should be teaching recruits how decisions are made under stress and how to develop and maintain their situational awareness. To be effective, situational awareness needs to be engrained in every aspect of training, both in words and in actions. For example (and I was trained this way, so I’m a as much a victim of this as any of you): We conduct training sessions of EMS providers where they are taught, repeatedly, to acknowledge they are wearing their personal protective equipment and the scene is safe.
However, the more times they SAY it, without actually DOING it, the more likely the script of SAYING it and NOT DOING it will become the behavior they display under stress. It is not enough to say you will do physical tasks, you must actually perform the task to program muscle and cognitive memory in the scripts the brain will run under stress.
When an EMS provider, in a training session, says the scene is safe without actually looking for and articulating those things they are looking for that ensures the scene is safe, they are programming a potentially dangerous script into their subconscious brain – one that when played during a real emergency the responder may find themselves replaying the verbal script in their mind that the scene is safe, without actually doing anything tangible to ensure that it is.
Richard B. Gasaway, PhD
www.RichGasaway.com
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