CitySafe have been working closely with the Emergency Services and other Public Sector organisations for over 6 years. 

With a comprehensive understanding of the requirements across civil resilience and integrated emergency management, and a proven partnership approach, CitySafe continue to deliver cost effective solutions that support the organisations strategic objectives and enhance the operational response and "Common Recognised Information Picture" during an emergency.

Some common challenges we have helped our clients to solve are shown below. Please Contact Us using the options on the right to see how we can help you. 

Police & Community Safety 

• Safer Neighbourhoods Initiatives are a key objective but limited manpower and competing operational requirements create a significant challenge in delivering effective and efficient results to the community.

• Measuring the success of Community engagement is time consuming and costly, but Key Performance Indicators to support the Analysis of Policing and Community Safety (APACS) framework and National Indicator Sets (NIS) are key in achieving local, regional and national policing objectives (and are increasingly tied to performance bonuses!)

• Fast time and slow time messaging is a proven policing capability but there still is no consistent model to implement. Local commanders must review and implement their own systems and tools which can take significant time and resource to assess and procure.

• Setting up a quick and low cost way to engage key communities such as Retail  and Transport hubs just seems to be far more difficult than it needs to be. A standard template would save a lot of time and administration.

• Command and Control is a core skill for the Police but does not always seem to be translated to apply to our own internal continuity and resilience. Under the Civil Contingencies Act there is a requirement to ensure that key services can still be maintained and delivered.  The ability to mobilise, coordinate and audit force resources when disruption occurs is a challenge due to the priority in delivering the external policing response.

• Delivering tabletop exercises is a key skill for the Police, both internally and in coordination with other Agencies and trusted partners. With internal competition for manpower and resource it is increasingly difficult to make the time available to design exercises and is even harder to coordinate the delivery and attendance of all key partners to the exercise venue.

Health 

• There is a dramatic increase in the volume of information from existing (and new) stakeholders and partners, with no common format or information consistency. This becomes a particular challenge during a Health incident such as flu pandemic.

• The current way to securely share key Health information during an incident lacks flexibility and risks compliance issues.

• Producing timely Status and Situation reports in relation to a health incident is crucial but this remains a very manual intensive process with people having to cut and paste different information from different systems, taking far too much time and tying up valuable resources that could be focussing on more important tasks (such as understanding what the information means, formulating strategies and making decisions)

• Training and exercising our own Health professionals (and key partners) in preparation for managing a Health emergency is increasingly difficult due to operational demands, with the risk of a lowering of the preparedness levels across the key organisations.

Fire & Rescue Service

• Although the FRS are experienced with delivering a risk based operational response, and have invested significant funding into training and equipment, there is still a gap in our ability to capture key strategic decisions and share these across a multi agency response in a timely and resource efficient way.

• Having an audit of key strategic decisions is crucial for compliance and post incident analysis purposes. Currently this is captured at the operational response level which isn't always appropriate, or on paper which is time consuming to manage and review post event.

• Increasing demands on the FRS for Multi Agency working (such as the new National ILO course) has highlighted the need to be able to work within a multi agency environment in which FRS resources may be limited at the strategic command level (eg if the incident is not an FRS lead) There is a need to be able to coordinate and share key strategic actions, resources and decisions outside of the FRS communications infrastructure, which is proving to be a significant resource and funding challenge, particularly for the smaller FRS organisations.

Local Authority, Civil Resilience

• A partnership approach to public Warning & Informing is key under the Civil Contingencies Act but finding a system that allows shared access across emergency response partners, public and private groups and both managed and self administered groups is proving a real challenge.

• The timely collection of status reports from key partners and internal council departments during an incident such as flu pandemic is hugely time consuming. This puts the EP team under considerable time pressures, resulting in the team spending more time chasing partners and departments for information than capturing and understanding current resource and capacity issues. 

• The ability to coordinate significant incidents and major events with partnership agencies and our key supply chain is crucial. The current methods of spreadsheet and paper logging do not allow us to share this information with partners in real time which delays resource allocation and recovery mobilisation.

If so please Contact Us using the options on the right as its likely that we can suggest some potential solutions based on our previous experiences.