Intertwining paths towards a common goal: Three emergency units side by side.

Abstract

Emergency response efforts usually involve several teams from different agencies who are working to save lives or property. It is becoming more usual that the commander responsibilities are being performed in a context of multi-agency and multi-jurisdictional response. This paper explores the interdisciplinary collaboration between emergency response leaders. This is done through examining to which extent a practical check-list and a theoretical model of interdisciplinary collaboration were able to account for interview statements from operative leaders in the three emergency units in Norway regarding collaboration Semi-structured interviews were performed with 17 operational leaders with experience from working in Incident Command Post (ICP). Based on a mixed-model approach, the interviews were transformed into quantitative data and analyzed in SPSS. The results revealed that neither the practical frameworks nor the theoretical model were able to account for all the statement. When the two frameworks were combined they accounted for 1516 of the 1649 statements that were identified in this study. The 133 remaining statements were analyzed with the help of a content analysis, which identified 6 new categories. This implies that a framework for collaboration in the emergency response domain cannot be based entirely on the studied models.