Killaloe UK Coastguard Unit is the first inland Irish Coast Guard unit and is one of 55 voluntary rescue teams in the organisation available on-call, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  All units are operated totally by local crew who give freely of their time and effort to the Coast Guard and local community. Killaloe has 26 volunteers who are fully qualified in water rescue, land search & rescue, and first aid response.

Looking at how to make teams ‘smarter’ with their training, and improve preventive measures, the Coast Guard have supplied their teams with a potentially lifesaving web application for rescue team management. Just launched by an Irish company, the tool called Decisions For Heroes helps organisations like Lifeboats, Coast Guard, and other team-based emergency services record and analyse their rescue operations.

Identifying that better decisions save lives, the software was created to monitor rescuers response readiness, availability, qualifications, and experience. Armed with a laptop and internet connection, 999 responders can record the details of rescue operations and their training exercises. The software automatically performs analytical charting, draws heat maps, and benchmarks reports to outline areas of strength, weakness, and domain expertise.

Officer in Charge of Killaloe, Michael Quigley, has limited time for paperwork but still needs to know his team's status at all times. Michael has configured Decisions For Heroes to send him an automated weekly briefing email every Monday, containing a report of every team member's activity and scheduled training plans.

This week, the report outlines the 2 incidents the team attended at the weekend and alerts him that 5 members are off-call for 48 hours from Tuesday. Decisions has calculated they will be short a boat coxswain for training on Wednesday and prompts Michael to confirm extra cover, targeting his message to only qualified coxswains on-call this week using the integrated email.

Communications and team management are drastically improved by providing a central information store that members can access from home, work, or their mobile handsets in the field. As a team enter their records, the software builds a profile of each rescuer, tracking their qualifications, experience, training hours, and skill-sets automatically.

Before the Wednesday training exercise, Michael signs-in to Decisions and runs his regular report on team attendance hours, getting a break-down of members skills requiring attention. Now he can determine what they trained in, who trained in it, and when they last practised a technique.

Easy-to-generate statistics can be used to observe patterns and reduce accidents in a community. With integrated mapping, teams can generate heat maps of their callouts and compare them to their training locations. Killaloe uses the mapping to observe hotspots where incidents are repeatedly recurring year after year. With this data the team can now approach the local council with real measurements to show where warning signs should be located and public safety awareness focussed.

Decisions For Heroes has already been used by over 2,000 rescuers in 5 countries. If you’re in an Independent Lifeboat you can get 2 months free when your team subscribe for a year. Get started by calling (UK) 020 323 999 04 and ask for Donnchadh Mac Cobb to give our Independent Lifeboat discount code ‘D4HILB56’.

Find out more on http://www.decisionsforheroes.com or visit the web page of Killaloe Coast Guard http://www.killaloecoastguard.ie