Saturday, March 28, 2009

Failure to Train

The editorial “Walking a mile in the wrong shoes” in Thursday’s Globe and Mail suggests that one of the factors contributing to the tasering death of Robert Dziekanski is that the Mounties on duty let their training lapse. The one who used the taser took his training 4 years earlier and had not taken any refresher training. The most senior of the officers on duty let his first aid training (which comes with an expiration date) expire 5 years before the incident.
That raises two issues:

(1) Although the literature on training today tends to focus on return on investment in training, in many situations—especially those involving health, law, life, and death—the real value is the ability of workers to act appropriately when the situation demands it. Training provides the preparation, refresher training maintains the readiness.

(2) That the two Mounties missed their training is part of a trend that is increasingly emerging in the training research: the longer one holds a position, the less likely they are to get training. How many other risks arise because someone was too busy to refresh their knowledge?

View the editorial at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090326.weTaser26/BNStory/specialComment/home.

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