Following the major incident within the Macondo prospect, the Oil Industry saw a need for a standardised approach to the management of incidents. It was recognised that, although not perfect for the global industry, an Incident Command System (ICS) is very effective for managing all resources during an incident of unprecedented scale.
There are many Incident Management Systems used throughout the world but to standardise them IPEICA produced a Good Practice Guide and defined IMS as:
A set of proven organisational and management principles, including common organisational elements, management structure, terminology and operating procedures.
Oil Spill Response have been working on developing their own suite of IMS Training courses based on the Good Practice Guide, using in-house abilities and experience in the design so that the course is highly interactive and fully engaging. In order to offer a standardised approach to all of our members, the logical step was to get the IMS courses accredited by the Nautical Institute which would allow us to appreciate operators’ variations in management while basing the core training on the Good Practice Guide definition.
Our latest course, IMS 300, has been designed using adult learning-based theory with a scenario-based theme running through the learning. This aids delegates in understanding the reactive and proactive development of Action Plans to deal with the incident. The learning delivered in the classroom-based course is then embedded by the inclusion of a facilitated Table-top exercise, which allows the delegates to utilise what they have learnt about the planning process to be able to develop an Incident Action Plan from information given to them at the Initial Incident Briefing.
OSRL’s online IMS 100 and IMS 200 courses as well as the facilitated classroom based IMS 300 course have all now been Accredited by the Nautical Institute.