Field Safety and Emergency Preparedness
Assessing risk before an activity rather than after, an assembly point everyone knows, and the limits of what an untrained volunteer may step into.
- Length
- 25 min
- modules
- 6
- questions
- 6
- Pass mark
- 80%
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Requirements
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Course information
- Level
- 2
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Length
- 25 min
- modules
- 6
- questions
- 6
- Pass mark
- 80%
- Language
- Arabic / English
- Certificate
- Certificate of completion on passing
Who this is for
- Every field volunteer
- Activity safety focal points
- Team leads
What you get
- A certificate with a public verification code
- The course recorded on your profile
- Credit towards your volunteer journey
What you will learn
Course contents
Assessing risk before the activity
Ten minutes of thinking before an activity is worth all the response training during it.
A risk is not what could theoretically happen; it is what can happen in this particular place with these particular people. A staircase without a handrail is not the same risk with a group of adults as with thirty children. A quiet side street in the morning is not the same street when schools come out. A good assessment does not list possible dangers — it ranks them by how likely they are and how much harm they would do, and gives each one an action with a name attached.
- Walk the space beforehand through the eyes of whoever will use it, not your own
- Write down every risk you see, however small — the small ones are what get forgotten and then happen
- Give each a likelihood (rare / possible / expected) and an impact (minor / moderate / serious)
- Start with what is expected and serious; do not spend the meeting on rare and minor
- Write an action against each: what changes, who does it, by when
- If a serious risk is left with no workable action, the decision is to change the venue or postpone
A risk with no action has not been assessed
The risk assessments that fail most often are the ones that end in a written list and a feeling of reassurance because it was written. "The street is a hazard" does nothing; "Samer is at the gate from 09:45 to 10:15 and no child leaves unaccompanied" does. The difference between the two is the difference between assessing a risk and reassuring yourself.
Your decision
In a risk assessment for a children’s activity, which do you deal with first?
The emergency plan
A plan known only to whoever wrote it is not a plan.
The safety lead
One named person per activity. Under pressure, the worst outcome is everyone deciding at once.
The assembly point
A specific place outside the building, told to everyone before the start, explained again to children in their own words.
The attendance list
A sheet or a phone that leaves with whoever leaves. An evacuation without the list cannot tell you who is still inside.
- Who calls the emergency services — one person, so nobody assumes somebody else did
- Who stays with the injured person and who takes the rest of the group
- Who meets the ambulance at the entrance and directs it
- Who contacts families, when, and in what words
- Where the nearest hospital is, and the route to it from this particular place
And the plan is said out loud before the activity starts, in one minute: this is the assembly point, this is the safety lead, this is who calls. That minute is the difference between a team that acts and a team that confers in the middle of the noise. The children are told too, in one sentence they can follow: "If you hear a whistle, we stop everything and walk with [name] to the yard."
Your decision
A small fire starts in the kitchen adjoining the hall. There are three of you and twenty-five children. What is the first action?
The limits of your role
Most harm that comes to volunteers in the field happens while they are trying to help with something they were not trained for.
✔ Within your role
- Making the area safe and moving people away from danger
- Calling the emergency services and giving them accurate information
- Staying with the injured person and talking to them
- Keeping the rest of the group back and calm
- Meeting the ambulance and directing it
✘ Outside your role
- Moving someone with a suspected neck or back injury
- Giving medicine or water to an unconscious person
- Entering a burning building or an unstable structure
- Intervening in a fight or a physically violent situation
- Attempting a rescue from water or from rubble
An injured volunteer doubles the problem
When you enter an unsafe place to save someone, you go from being a person who can call for help to a person who needs it — and a team with one casualty now has two, one of them its own responsibility. This is not a lack of courage; it is the first thing professional responders are taught everywhere, which is why every protocol opens with "is the scene safe?".
A difficult scenario
What do you do?
A child has fallen from a low wall and is complaining of neck pain. He is conscious and talking, the ground is cold, and his family will arrive shortly.
Calling the emergency services
One call, and the order of the information in it decides when the ambulance arrives.
- Exactly where you are: the address, the nearest known landmark, and the floor if there is one
- What happened, in one sentence
- How many are injured, and roughly what age
- Their condition: conscious or not, breathing or not, bleeding or not
- Your own number — and do not hang up before they do
Location before incident. If the line drops after your first sentence, an ambulance can move if it knows where — and can do nothing if it only knows what happened. That order is what gets forgotten under pressure, because the natural urge is to start with what feels most urgent to you.
Know the numbers before you need them
The emergency, civil defence and nearest-hospital numbers go into every activity plan and onto more than one person’s phone — not only the coordinator’s. Searching for a number during an emergency is the worst possible moment to be searching for it.
Check your understanding
How do you begin an emergency call?
Who is hit hardest in an emergency
An evacuation plan that suits everybody suits nobody.
An evacuation that assumes everyone in the hall can hear the alarm and walk quickly to the door leaves behind the people who cannot. The wheelchair user, the child who does not hear, the older woman who walks slowly, the frightened child who freezes rather than runs — each of them needs a named person before the activity starts, not to be noticed missing at the assembly point.
- Ask at registration whether anyone needs help moving or hearing — and ask privately, not in front of everyone
- Assign a named person to anyone who needs accompanying, and tell them before the activity rather than during it
- Choose a venue with an exit a wheelchair can reach, or change the venue
- Make the signal both visible and audible: a whistle plus a light or an agreed hand signal
- Remember that a frightened child freezes rather than runs — do not assume they will follow the group
Your decision
The only available hall is on the second floor with no lift, and one participant uses a wheelchair. What is the decision?
After the incident
What happens in the following hour decides whether it happens again.
- Confirm everyone is safe and nobody has been left unaccounted for
- Tell the coordinator immediately, even if it ended well
- Write the incident report the same day, with facts and quotations
- Contact the families of anyone affected in agreed wording, not on individual initiative
- Sit with the team for even ten minutes: what happened, what worked, what was missing
- Change the risk assessment for the next activity based on what you learned
The incident that did not happen
The child who nearly got into the street and did not, the cable that nearly tripped someone, the door found open — these matter more than actual incidents, because they are a free warning. Organisations that record near misses fix things before they cost anybody anything; those that do not learn about the fault from the incident itself.
Check your understanding
The street door came open during an activity and a volunteer noticed and shut it before anyone approached. Is it reported?
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Standards this content is built on
- • IFRC — standards to facilitate the safety, security and well-being of volunteers
- • IFRC Volunteering Policy (August 2022)
- • UNDRR terminology on disaster risk reduction
- • Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (2024 edition)