Emergency Response and Recovery

The UK’s approach to civil protection is founded on concept of integrated emergency management (IEM); a set of arrangements which enables organisations to prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies.

Emergency Response and Recovery (ERR) are vital elements of IEM. Effective ERR enables organisations to deal with the consequences of incidents, emergencies or other disruptive events. 

ERR involves using existing skills such as analysis, leadership and communications – but in the context of an emergency. At the individual level, ERR typically involves leading a team so that it functions effectively throughout an emergency, taking decisions (under pressure of time) and recording them for subsequent scrutiny. For teams, ERR can involve working together – making sense of a situation so as to understand how it might affect the work of the team. And for organisations, ERR will involve for example, the setting of a clear strategy to prioritise scarce resources, and for using a range of communications techniques to affect decisions by citizens impacted by the emergency. 

Some individuals working in the ERR field will be resilience specialists. But many will work in other disciplines, dealing with resilience issues as part of a wider brief.  

ERR can be applied in single agency settings, dealing with an emergency from a team or organisational perspective. In some cases however, ERR practitioners or teams will work as part of a multi-agency partnership to address the consequences of an emergency.     

Examples of roles with ERR responsibilities are: 

• very senior leaders who will set their organisation’s strategy and overall priorities in event of an emergency;  

• middle managers who will lead crisis response and recovery activity across a business unit; 

• front line supervisors leading teams such as a rest centre management team or those responding at the scene of an incident; 

• staff who are due to represent their organisation at a multi agency response or recovery coordinating group. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has starkly demonstrated that the UK’s resilience community goes well beyond those organisations with a civil protection role or who operate critical infrastructure. The EPC offers therefore, ERR training for private sector incident and crisis managers, so that organisations that do not have a civil protection function are able to respond to and recover from crises affecting their own business. 

The EPC delivers ERR training for professionals at all stages of their career, from new starts to experienced senior leaders. For new starts, we offer foundation level training to teach basic skills which can be applied in a range of emergency settings. We also offer masterclasses for experienced professionals who want to keep current. The EPC is also able to support organisations that want to develop or test their ERR arrangements or to practice them in realistic scenarios.