HEAT (Hostile Environment Awareness Training) is a course designed for people whose jobs take them to difficult, remote, or hostile environments. Threats such as sexual violence, carjacking, robbery, and detention are very real in areas of poor governance, conflict, natural disaster, and war. Medical facilities can be scarce and inaccessible. HEAT will help you how to identify, assess, and avoid risks.
Where is ‘safe’?
When determining where we are safe, or unsafe, we usually use locations, or countries.
This unhelpfully focuses our safety on a single aspect – the location – which is mostly beyond our control. While the location we are in is important, it is not the sole or even the most crucial aspect in our safety.
Safety and security are basic, human needs along with food water and rest. They are core to our well-being. Every day we assess, whether we are safe or not. If we don’t feel safe, we change our location or we address the thing that makes us feel unsafe. Remaining in danger results in tremendous physical and mental stress. At home, or our regular workplaces we know what risks we face and we do things to reduce those risks.
When we move into new locations, even if it’s just another town or city, we will face new risks there and we need to assess those risks. Risks may be different because of individual factors like who you are: things like our previous work experience, nationality, ethnicity age, sexual identification, or gender. Context factors, like where you are, the duration of your trip, cultural medical or physical infrastructure, climate or endemic diseases. Activity factors, such as what you were doing. We need to consciously assess all of these and that is what the risk assessment process does.
We need to consider ourselves and our work activities in any environment in addition to any location-based dangers or threats.
We also need to think about where we get our information.
You will frequently receive conflicting information about how safe a location is or how safe you will be there. How do you know what to believe or who to trust?
A risk assessment process is designed to help you distinguish truth from opinion and to identify all of your risks – including those related to your location, yourself and the work you will be doing.