Situation Awareness of the Command Staff in Large-Scale and Prolonged Rescue Operations – Barriers, Paradigms and Recommendations

Abstract

Purpose: This paper presents a conceptual review of Situation Awareness (SA) at the command staff level during large-scale and prolonged rescue operations within Poland's National Firefighting and Rescue System (KSRG). The objective is to identify cognitive and communicative barriers degrading collective SA and to formulate strategic systemic recommendations for the organisation of incident command within this system. The analysis deliberately shifts the unit of analysis from the individual commander to the command staff as a collective entity, in line with the binding KG PSP rules on the organisation of the command staff. Introduction: The dominant paradigm in the firefighting literature reduces situational decision-making to the figure of the Incident Commander, omitting the collective dynamics of the command staff as a distributed cognitive system. Reports from the U.S. NIOSH Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program repeatedly identify loss of situational awareness as a contributing factor in line-of-duty fatalities. Methodology: A narrative literature review (1972–2025) was applied, based on Endsley's three-level SA model (perception  comprehension  projection), Reason's organisational accident model, Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory, Klein's Recognition-Primed Decision framework, and the distributed situation awareness paradigm of Stanton and colleagues. The conceptual analysis is illustrated with an illustrative composite case framed by Reason's “Swiss cheese” model, while its conclusions are anchored in the current KG PSP rules on staff organisation and on organising rescue operations. The review additionally draws on Cowan's revision of working-memory capacity, Parasuraman and Riley's analysis of automation-induced complacency and the literature on the irrelevant speech effect. Conclusions: SA of the command staff is not a simple sum of individual situational pictures — it is a collective product of communication processes, role distribution and technical tools. Three problems specific to staff work (cascade distortion, communicative noise, escalation of commitment) are identified. Six systemic recommendations for the PSP are formulated: strengthening periodic command-staff briefings, the single-data-interpreter principle within the operations team, structured rotation of key staff functions, protecting the command from external distraction by officials and the media, developing a common operational picture (SWD PSP, situational maps, TAK-class systems) with an anti-complacency protocol, and integrating immersive (VR) training with structured after-action review into command education.