Practice area three: After-Action Learning
After the Call
A practical way for fire, paramedic and healthcare services to learn from incidents, near misses and good catches, without turning the review into a search for someone to blame.
Why it exists
What happens after the call matters
Every service has events it still talks about: the close call on the fireground, the lift that ended a career, the wrong dose caught at the last second. An organization can find someone to blame and leave the conditions in place, or it can understand how the work actually unfolded, care for the people involved, and change what set them up. After the Call is built for the second path.
The program
Three parts, one practice
The manual
The method your service can adopt and adapt: event triage, three tiers of review, a learning firewall, a model policy and templates. Free under a Creative Commons licence.
About the manual ↗The courses
Short, practical courses that teach the method, from a free 60-minute foundations course to one-day courses for committees and safety leaders.
See the courses ↗Reviews and partner agreements
An expert read of your own analysis, annual partner agreements, and independent learning reviews when an event needs outside eyes.
How reviews work ↗Three tiers, one method
Event Triage, within 24 hours or by the next business day, matches the effort to the event. The highest trigger met sets the tier, and anyone in the Triage Group can escalate.
| Tier | What it is | Who leads it |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | After-Action Review. A hot debrief within the shift, and a structured review within 72 hours. | Officers, supervisors and team leads |
| Tier 2 | Post-Incident Analysis. A structured internal analysis over 30 to 60 days. | A trained internal facilitator |
| Tier 3 | Independent Learning Review. An external review that runs alongside statutory processes. | An independent reviewer |
The principle
The learning firewall
Information gathered in a learning process is used for learning, and is not used as the basis for discipline. Conduct concerns (suspected intentional harm, impairment, reckless disregard or criminal acts) go to a separate accountability process run by different people, and the learning continues. Statutory processes always take precedence. Any organization adopting the firewall should review it with counsel and against its collective agreements.
Built for requirements you already carry
CFAI accreditation, NFPA 1550, Ontario's Occupational Health and Safety Act, Accreditation Canada's patient safety incident management practice, and the Canadian Incident Analysis Framework all expect services to learn from events. After the Call gives you a practical way to do it, with sector notes for fire, paramedic and healthcare services. Ontario first.
Book a 30-minute call
Talk to us about learning from events
Tell us about your service and what you are trying to put in place. Thirty minutes, no charge. Please do not include personal health information or details that could identify a person or an event.