In the spirit of Stephen's suggestion, and to analyse your key point ...

We were wondering if you were aware of any research or data that allows us to understand how operational decisions are made and the types of response activities that are undertaken during an incident response by operational staff? 

 An interesting context is a challenge of introducing Integrated Primary Mental Health Care in Rural and Regional contexts. The history of this goes back to the introduction of Medicare rebates for psychological services in primary care via general practitioners/family physical referrals (introduced in Australia in 2007). When this policy change was enacted, there was not a commitment to the sort of system-based and operational reflexivity you are referring to Stuart. IN many ways, this lack of attention to system-based reflexivity is common across a lot of knowledge intensive industry networks and perhaps is an area that the domain of KM could have advocated for, supported and enabled over long periods of time. Arguing for both empirical and intuitive responses to system pertubations. 

Many psychologists have been arguing and promoting such system-based reflexivity - an example of a recently released publication is this https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-981-10-5012-1_9-1 (declaring my sister is the author of this article), published in this book Handbook of Rural, Remote, and very Remote Mental Health.

Noting that the language of practitioner decision-based reflexivity as we would use this in KM does not permeate other knowledge-intensive industry networks such as those that make up any integrated health care service systems. 

I am aware that the Vic Govt emergency service networks have done some very good work over a period of time in emergency management along the lines you are describing, but I cannot for the life of me remember the context in which I heard about this. But given your networks, I am sure you are right on to this. 

For the moment, 

Richard 

On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 9:53 AM Stephen Bounds <km@...> wrote:

Hi Stu,

I don't have any specific research, but I think you might find some productive starting points in clinical practice. For example the document below has an extensive section on the process of evaluation and revision of clinical practice guidelines:

https://www.health.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0029/143696/nhmrc_clinprgde.pdf

Specifically I thought this might be helpful as an overarching approach for your work:

Among possible methods for evaluation of guidelines are the following:

• comparing changes in clinical practice or health outcomes, or both, in areas of exceptionally high guideline promotion with changes in areas of exceptionally low guideline promotion;

• comparing health outcomes in areas of exceptionally high guideline uptake with outcomes in areas of exceptionally low guideline uptake—focus group testing can be useful to elucidate factors that have influenced this uptake.

When evaluating the guidelines it is important to focus on the guidelines themselves, rather than on the clinicians or other service providers. If there is little change in practice, or little adherence to the guidelines, this may be a consequence of a wide range of factors, among them the guideline development, dissemination and implementation process.

This would map nicely to a SenseMaker approach if you were so inclined and wanted to drill down into specific clusters.

Cheers,
Stephen.

====================================
Stephen Bounds
Executive, Information Management
Cordelta
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M: 0401 829 096
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On 20/01/2021 9:22 am, Stuart French wrote:

Hi all,

The CFA R&D team are currently developing the "Our Operations" section of the 10-year Research Implementation Plan. 

 

We were wondering if you were aware of any research or data that allows us to understand how operational decisions are made and the types of response activities that are undertaken during an incident response by operational staff? Links to the broader decision making field would be appreciated, but anything specific to emergency services is what we are after.

 

We were hoping to design some research which captures the current baseline of response decisions and actions, evaluates their outcomes, and provide recommendations for improvements. This includes the difference between actual decision making and the official planned and reasoned decisions that are often talked about in retrospect once the outcome is known. 

 

It would be wonderful if you could point us in the direction of any people, existing resources, or data that would help us to better understand this space.

Cheers,

Stuart French
Program Mgr, Knowledge, Country Fire Authority (Australia)

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Richard Vines

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