Better preparedness for less money
For SHE managers: your organisation can be compliant – and still be unprepared.
- Cards for 15+ scenarios
- 10–15-minute drills
- Data from AC-Analytics
The call is free, with no obligation.
Ivan T. Herrmann
Owner of Action-cards® and former surf lifeguard
What I know — and why
As a safety advisor – and from years of handling real-life emergencies as a surf lifeguard:
- One course a year doesn't hold - even certified first-aiders perform the critical steps poorly, however recent the training.
- The person closest to the scene can act with Action-cards® – step by step in 15+ scenarios.
- Everyone can practise in 10–15 minutes – no instructor, whenever it suits you, and no extra budget.
- AC-Analytics shows who has actually trained – readiness you can document, not just record.
Most safety systems measure whether the course was completed. Emergencies measure whether people can act.
Those are not the same thing. You did not get into safety to tick boxes. You got into it because you wanted people to go home unharmed — and you know the difference between a workplace that is genuinely ready and one that merely looks ready on paper.
So here is the question worth sitting with: is your current setup actually working? Not in the records. In practice. When it matters.
The Training Investment That Keeps Losing Value
Most organisations handle emergency preparedness the same way: run a course, issue a certificate, file the record, repeat next year.
A review of peer-reviewed literature by the CSA Group found that emergency response skills start declining less than six months after initial training1.
A 2025 meta-analysis in BMC Public Health confirmed correct performance rates of 74–90% immediately after training, falling markedly within 6 to 8 months2. And that is measured under exam-like conditions, where participants know they are being assessed.
Acute stress compounds this further: it impairs verbal memory, narrows attention, and causes people to rely on far fewer cues than they would in a calm environment3.
A study of 257 certified first responders shows that when people have to act from memory alone, critical steps are either performed incorrectly or forgotten entirely – even shortly after certification8.
With Action-cards® in hand, 80–90% of all steps are performed correctly, according to Action-cards®’ own implementation data.
What This Costs — in Every Sense
You carry responsibility for safety in two ways at the same time. The first is the one that keeps you up at night: an incident escalating further than it should because the first response was too slow or simply wrong.
The second matters in budget conversations: a medically consulted work injury costs about $48,000 on average. That is an all-in figure — wage losses, medical, administrative and employer costs. Count the indirect effects too — downtime, retraining, management time — and you can add a further, conservatively set 10%, bringing a single incident closer to $52,800. Full documentation in our Data & Methodology Note.
Better real-world emergency preparedness at 30–40% lower total cost does not just save money. It frees resources for more safety. That is not a trade-off — that is a better outcome by every measure.
The Problem With Leaving It to the Designated Few
Many larger organisations invest in a small group of dedicated emergency responders. It is a reasonable instinct — but it rests on an assumption that rarely gets examined: that the designated person will be close enough, and available, when it matters.
Availability is not a guarantee. It is a variable.
Consider what “available” actually means across a normal working week. Lunch break. Different floor. Client meeting. Off sick. On leave. Covering another site. Phone on silent in a training session.
In organisations running shifts, covering multiple locations, or relying on a small number of designated people, there will be periods — possibly frequent ones — where the organisation’s actual emergency response capability is close to zero.
Most organisations cannot answer a simple question: at any given moment, how far away is the nearest person with the tools and confidence to respond correctly? For many, the honest answer is: we do not know.
When minutes matter, proximity is not enough.
But even when the designated responder is present and nearby, the time cost is often unacceptable. In a cardiac arrest, the problem becomes clear: for every minute help is delayed, the chance of survival falls considerably. Studies have reported a reduction in survival of around 7–10% for every minute without CPR.5
The difference between a one-minute response and a four-minute response is not a scheduling preference — it is a significantly lower probability of survival.6
CPR is the most studied example of a principle that applies to any time-critical incident: the faster the correct response, the better the outcome. A chemical spill contained in two minutes causes a fraction of the harm of one left unchecked for ten. A fire reported and acted on immediately is a contained incident; the same fire left while someone locates the designated person is a different situation entirely.
A cyber incident isolated immediately affects one machine; left for ten minutes while someone finds the right person to call, it can compromise an entire network. The type of incident changes. The principle stays the same.
Designating a few creates permission for everyone else to wait.
There is a further, subtler problem. Concentrating responsibility in a few designated people gives everyone else implicit permission not to act — what psychologists call the Bystander Effect.7
A distributed model, where everyone has the tools and confidence to respond correctly, breaks that dynamic entirely. That is exactly the principle Action-cards are built on.
Action-cards do not replace the specialist. They ensure that whoever is actually present in the first critical minutes can act correctly while the specialist is on the way — and that the organisation is never, unknowingly, operating without effective emergency response capability.
A Systemic Solution
Action-cards are durable, physical emergency response cards — waterproof, shock-resistant, no app or connectivity required — that guide any employee through the correct response sequence step by step, across over 30 sector-specific categories.
This covers everything from physical first aid and industrial incidents to IT and cyber emergency preparedness, developed together with specialists in each field.
Internal data shows employees using the cards in realistic scenarios achieve correct action rates of 80–90%.
The cards are not only for real incidents. They are also the guide for training. Because the correct steps are already on the card, any team leader can run a 10–15-minute scenario drill with their team.
No external instructors needed. No complicated scheduling. No separate budget line. Instead, built into the working week. Not added on top.
AC-Analytics
AC-Analytics is where most organisations discover how much they have been missing. Most know who attended training. Very few know who continues to practise — or how well they perform when it counts.
AC-Analytics closes that gap: every QR scan automatically logs time, user, and action, feeding dashboards that surface skill gaps, near-miss patterns, and performance trends across all incident types and locations.
Exportable for compliance, CSR, and insurance conversations in minutes. Other solutions offer training and certification. With Action-cards® and AC-Analytics, you offer visibility and the data to prove that your emergency preparedness is real, not just recorded.
Before, I could show who had attended a course. Now I can show who has actually trained – and where we need to focus. That is a completely different conversation with management.
SHE leader (needs approval)
From Framework to Practice
If your organisation has committed to Safety-II, HOP, Resilience Engineering, or ISO 31000, you are probably familiar with a specific frustration: these frameworks are intellectually sound — and genuinely hard to operationalise at the level where emergencies actually happen.
The frameworks agree on a few core principles: a good system accounts for the fact that people forget and make mistakes. The organisation must be able to respond, monitor, learn and anticipate. And risk management must be based on data and continuously improved. In practice, most emergency preparedness still relies on the opposite: that people remember what they learned on a course a year ago.
Action-cards®are a direct operationalisation of these principles. The cards redesign the context so correct behaviour is supported in the moment — exactly what HOP prescribes. AC-Analytics provides the monitoring, near-miss logging, and learning loop that Safety-II and ISO 31000 require. If the gap between framework aspiration and daily reality has been frustrating, Action-cards and AC-Analytics are a direct way to close it.
The Practical Question
You are responsible for what happens when something goes wrong — whether that is a worker in medical distress, a fire not contained fast enough, or a cyber incident that escalates because no one could remember the right first three steps.
The question is not whether this costs more than what you are doing now. It almost certainly does not. The question is whether what you are doing now is working well enough — and whether you can prove it.
You are not asking for more money. You are proposing to restructure existing spend to produce better emergency preparedness, better documentation, and measurably better outcomes — across more risk categories, at lower total cost, with the evidence to prove it.
next step
See what a day could look like for your team
Tell us a little about your team, and we’ll show you an example of a team-building day and a micro-training rhythm that fits your everyday work.
On the call, you’ll get
- A concrete example of how the day runs
- Scenarios that fit your workplace
- A suggestion for how often you can train afterwards
The call is free, with no obligation.
From real life
… our staff have significantly increased their confidence, decisiveness, and ability to take action.
Anders Møller Bilander
Operation Manager at Gentofte LIFE
Learn more about Action-cards®
The solution has five parts. Here are the ones that fit team building.
First Aid Course with Action-cards®
Your team learns safe first aid with the cards – and keeps it fresh with micro-training.
Action-cards®
Physical cards that guide you step by step through more than +15 scenarios. No app, no internet.
References
1 CSA Group, First Aid Training and CPR Skills Retention — csagroup.org
2 BMC Public Health, Skill retention after school-based CPR training – a systematic review and meta-analysis (2025) — bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com
3 Regehr & LeBlanc, PTSD, Acute Stress, Performance and Decision-Making in Emergency Service Workers, Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (2017); and: Decision-Making During High-Risk Events: A Systematic Literature Review, PMC (2023)
4 OSHA, Safety Pays — Background — osha.gov/safetypays/background
5 Recent advances and controversies in adult cardiopulmonary resuscitation, PMC — pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2600120
6 Red Cross / CARES, CPR Facts and Statistics — redcross.org
7 St John Ambulance, From bystander to first responder – the psychology of emergency response — sja.org.uk
8 Anderson GS, Gaetz M, Masse J. First aid skill retention of first responders within the workplace. Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med. 2011;19:11. Observational study of 257 certified first responders in industrial and service workplaces. Correct performance by step: securing the scene below 5%, correct hand placement for abdominal thrusts 33%, correct hand placement for compressions 45%, activating EMS 52%, compressions to trained standard 31%.