The Strategic Leaders’ Guide, a user-friendly aide memoire for multi agency incident command, has been awarded national ‘good practice’ status by the UK Government’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat. The Guide was designed and developed by Staffordshire’s Civil Contingencies Unit (CCU) after their experience of supporting strategic leaders during the Summer 2007 Floods. All 22 of the Staffordshire Resilience Forum partnership’s Category 1 responder organisations are issued with the Guide, which is about to be updated to incorporate further improvements in early October 2011.

Andy Marshall, Staffordshire’s Director of Civil Contingencies (and Editorial Advisory Panel Member for CRJ) outlined the benefits of the Guide: ‘Its guiding principles are simplicity, accountability and flexibility of use, no matter whether the incident being managed is a flood, a disease outbreak or a serious plane crash. It respects the fact that strategic leaders, such as Chief Executives, are busy people who often do not have the time to read detailed plans before or during an incident. However, the consistent approach taken by the Guide helps to ensure that the key structures of any multi agency response or recovery operation can be set up quickly, calmly and confidently.’

Andy also described the wider benefits of the Guide: ‘In these challenging economic times and with the 2012 Olympics just around the corner, the Guide provides a very cost-effective solution to multi agency incident response and recovery. Not only is it standard issue across our partnership, but it can also be used by other Local Resilience Forum areas with a few minor changes. The CCU is constantly looking to maximise value for money in the support that it provides to its local partners and the Guide and its accompanying coaching programme are excellent examples of this’.

The Guide has also been featured as a European Best Practice Case Study by the EU-funded COIM-BEST Project. For more information on this please visit http://coimbest.eu/ In the near future, the Guide will be shared across the UK via the National Resilience Extranet (NRE). For more information in the meantime, please contact the CCU direct on 01785 898618.