Health and safety leadership is fundamental to protecting uniformed frontline responders during disasters, particularly in systems that rely heavily on volunteers. Disaster environments are high risk, fast moving and complex, and leadership decisions can directly influence whether responders are exposed to preventable, life altering harm. Despite this, health and safety leadership in disaster response remains under defined in both research and practice.
Leading with Care is a qualitative study examining how response organisations define and enact health and safety leadership, and how this shapes the protection of personnel during operations. Semi structured interviews were conducted with health and safety leaders, statutory role holders and operational decision makers across four case study organisations, as well as other subject matter experts within the sector. The research explored how health and safety leadership is understood, how it is demonstrated and by whom, and how urgent community safety needs are balanced against responder occupational safety during response.
Findings highlight variability in how health and safety leadership is conceptualised and how its structural, legal and moral boundaries are understood. There are contrasting views around how work health and safety legislation interacts alongside other legislation and operating structures in response, who owns frontline risk-dependant decisions in declared emergencies, particularly in multi-agency environments, and the relationship between health and safety leadership and operational hierarchy. All participants agreed that there are opportunities to grow health and safety leadership capability within the sector, and drew on their own experience to help define what the sector needs to achieve that.
This interactive presentation will provide practical, evidence informed insights to grow health and safety leadership capability that is protective yet enables our frontline responder workforce.