Emergency Response and Incident Management
From contact to recovery
Emergency response covers the actions taken when prevention fails. Candidates must understand the incident management cycle: recognise, alert, respond, stabilise, and recover. Protective teams prepare actions on for contact, vehicle ambush, medical emergency, fire, and principal illness. Each action must be rehearsed, briefed, and assigned to a named role.
Key concepts include the extraction plan (how the principal leaves the incident area), casualty care (tourniquets, airway, and the location of medical assets), scene control (keeping the principal moving and away from secondary threats), and post-incident procedures (accounting for the team, preserving evidence, and reporting). The team must also plan for secondary devices and follow-on attacks, which are common after an initial strike.
Traps and rule of thumb
A frequent trap is stopping to treat or investigate at the contact point; the priority is to move the principal out of the kill zone first, then treat. Another is neglecting the accountability check - knowing where every team member and the principal are after an incident. Beware of plans that assume emergency services will arrive quickly; the team must be self-sufficient in the first minutes.
Worked rule of thumb: follow the sequence - move the principal to cover, extract from the kill zone, then treat and account. Never let treatment at the contact point delay extraction.