Heather Stuart

This study will examine in-depth lessons from historical emergencies and disasters by engaging with state and federal response agencies, as well as those supporting response and recovery, and local government.

Emergencies are increasing in complexity, duration, and the number of agencies involved. This is likely to lead to an increasing number of errors being made, breakdowns in teams and degraded operational situations. These problems will play out within the context of a decreasing tolerance in the community and their political representatives. Rather than distributing the blame to individuals we need to acknowledge that errors and breakdowns in emergency management teams will occur, and that it is important to seek and manage them in a mature and systematic way. The current project has three main research streams that are examining team monitoring, decision making and organisational learning.

Catastrophic events are cascading in nature, escalating in their impacts as interconnected essential services fail, causing further impacts and making the recovery more complex and prolonged. Events may not respect borders or boundaries, resulting in unclear accountabilities amongst responding agencies, and conflicting strategies and public messaging as different jurisdictions respond.

This study commenced in July 2017, and aims to better understand the nature of catastrophe and identify ways to improve management approaches in the Australian context.

This new study, which began in July 2017, will focus on understanding what effective diversity and inclusion is and how this can be measured. This will be achieved through identifying where effective diversity and inclusion is occurring within organisations, the characteristic of this and how it can be implemented and measured at an organisational level. This will be examined from community, organisational and economic perspectives.

For the first time, a nationwide research project will investigate the mental health and wellbeing of Australia’s emergency service staff and volunteers. This new project, led by beyondblue in collaboration with the CRC, will invite up to 20,000 current and former personnel from 35 police and emergency organisations across Australia to participate in a survey about their mental health and risk of suicide.

This project will provide important information to understand both the number of people affected and the range of issues they face.