Any organisation involved with people in an emergency situation, particularly the larger incident, needs to keep comprehensive, contemporaneous, managerial and other 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 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, 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 taken during the incident and the information received on which decisions and actions were based.

To enable organisations to provide such records, the Emergency Pocket Log Book© (EPLB)© has been developed. Similar in layout and contents to the well known and widely used Emergency Log Book© and Emergency Incident Record Book© (EIRB©) but with fewer pages and a smaller format, it is intended as an incident specific book for a manager, where the A4 Emergency Log Book© and Emergency Incident Record Book© (EIRB©) are more appropriate to the longer duration incidents where more than one manager may be undertaking the post. It is also useful for the operational staff who attend the emergency, as they may subsequently have to verify what was said to them or what they said.

Each EPLB© 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 manager or operational member of staff 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, or comments made, the EPLB© 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 EPLB© 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 POCKET LOG BOOK©

Order the EPLB© HERE