The Inspector-General for Emergency Management recommends that Emergency Management Victoria – in consultation with relevant agencies – develop a system to manage personnel and asset deployments to all tiers of incident management to meet the needs of the emergency and support the health and wellbeing of personnel.
Where appropriate and within occupational health and safety requirements, this may include:
a) standardised shift rosters across agencies and incident management tiers
b) a single or integrated platform to allow consistent recording of shift times and locations
c) records of accreditation, qualification, training and currency.
EMV will work with the sector to develop and implement a robust system for Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) incident management.
IGEM’s 2021 progress report noted that EMV had commenced the development of a software system to provide an aggregated view of reported OH&S incidents and enable the identification and analysis of developing agency trends.
Agencies have supported the development of a shared single-point OH&S incident notification dashboard since 2016, with the project originally co-funded by DELWP, CFA, FRV (formerly Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services Board), VICSES and EMV.
Agencies commenced operational testing of the system in July 2021. In October 2021 EMV updated SCRC that further work was required to ensure the system delivered up-to-date visibility and analysis of OH&S incidents during major events.
The system is accessible to OH&S personnel via EM-COP. EMV provided IGEM with system screenshots and information on its testing during 2022.
IGEM understands that testing of the system remains ongoing and will revisit this action in its next progress report.