Joint working

Good morning all I hope you have had a good week. This weekend sees me covering lates 1100 until 2100. This shift normally brings a variety incidents and taskings.

Hospitals always seem to be busier over the weekend ( not a proven fact it just seems like it). As operations officers we liaise with our local hospitals to avoid and manage handover delays. East Dorset has two acute hospitals in our patch and this can often prove challenging. Our operations officers meet with both hospitals on a weekly basis to discuss any problems which arise and to work out solutions or changes to practice. These meetings are in addition to our daily contacts to deal with issues and potential problems as they occur.

The past few weeks has seen a large number of serious incident in East Dorset, which has seen joint working between all responding agencies. As more JESIP (Joint Emergency Services Interoperasbility Program) sessions take place over the coming months this will give the opportunity to train more commanders and refresh others in key skills.
JESIP ensures all commanders from the responding agencies use a common and systematic approach to command of an incident. All agencies will have their own roles and responsibilities at an incident but JESIP aims to ensure our initial multi agency response is more organised, structured and practised. Regular use of the JESIP principles at incidents and training exercises means that the principles are embedded into our every day practice and become second nature.

More information about the JESIP program can be found here www.jesip.org.uk/home

Regular meetings with organisations outside of our immediate teams also enables networking to take place and relationships to be built up which can only be beneficial to joint working.

The overarching aim of all our meetings, exercises and joint working at incident is to benefit patients and improve their outcomes by working together.

As always stay safe and don't forget it will be darker earlier due to the clocks going back.