LITIGATION / ENQUIRES / COMPLAINTS

Any organisation involved with people in an emergency situation, particularly the larger incident, needs to keep comprehensive, contemporaneous records.

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 organisation's that employed them.

If, during their investigations, it is discovered that the organisation has limited or inadequate records of the actions and decisions 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 inquiry into the emergency, at various levels of importance and involvement, possibly up to and including a full public inquiry. In any inquiry, 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 actions and decisions taken during the incident and the information received on which they were based.

For any duty manager or officer in an organisation who uses the DECISION Log Book© as a record of his/her decisions, the ability to prove actions or to disprove allegations is valuable; it could prove invaluable! This will also be the case when the decision is taken by a group brought together from participating organisations whether composed of Category 1 or Category 2 Responders or a combination of both Categories.

To enable Category 1 Responder organisations and/or Category 2 Responder organisations to provide such definitive records, the DECISION Log Book© has been developed.

Each book 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 log books, a clear and definitive legal record can be provided for any report, inquiry or court process.

In the event of a complaint or allegation about one person or group’s decision on a particular date, the DECISION Log Book© should clearly show, to the court or inquiry investigating the matter, the detail necessary to deal adequately with the relevant issues. It is also vital that any record made is permanent and that it is filed away securely as a definitive record.

The DECISION Log Book© is designed as a permanent record. The DECISION Log Book(s) will be filed away in secure storage for at least 25 years, with the EMERGENCY Log Books© (ELB)©, the EMERGENCY Incident Record Books© (EIRB) and/or the EMERGENCY Pocket Log Books© (EPLB)©.

Protect the organisations, and your managers, by insisting on contemporaneous decision records being produced, using the newly developed DECISION Log 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.