Competency maintenace for Technical Rescue

[Spaka]

I am with Queensland Fire and Rescue in Australia. We have three different levels for personnel in the tech rescue area. 1 is the most basic technicial level. 2 a higher level of training and instructor level. 3, there is only 3 in the state, instruct the level 2.
I am qualified High Angle, Confined Space and Trench at level 2.
There has been an on going issue regarding the amount of time that should be dedicated to skills maintenace of level 2 technicians.
State level management have now come up with two days a year per person for all dicsiplines including USAR and Swift Water, this seems to me to be grossly inadequate.
I was wondering how much time is dedicated to this type of skill maintenance in other departments.
:confused:

[MtnRsq]

Two days (or equivalent) to cover all those areas seems awfully light.

Our "maintenance" training varies according to discipline (we don't do trench so it is zero for that). We get over 100 hours in high angle - just for rock. Snow/ice is approx. 60-72. Periodic reaccreditation/testing can add an additional 24-48 hours doing full blown scenarios.

I am curious as to what they are looking for in the maintenance requirement. Is it to check the little box that says, "Yep, they got their training and are good to go."? Does this supplement regular training?

[truck6alpha]

Yeah, I'd have to agree that it sounds a little lacking to me. Why don't you consider switching to competency based training? Determine what terminal objectives you feel like the technicians should be able to perform. Then tell them to expect to be tested on random objectives monthly, quarterly, or annually. Let them train for the competencies they feel they need work on. That way you don't have your most experienced rope guy just doing hours of rope training because he's stuck with a required number of hours to meet.

Of course, this concept requires personnel to police themselves and for testing to be tough enough to insure that the personnel maintain competency, but once they've proven they can do the job and if you give them scenario based training throughout the year, it works pretty well.

[NJTF1Bowman]

Two is very short. We just completed 6 days of just shoring end of last year and I still think we needed a day or two more.....