LAUSR

Abstract Effective emergency response to any disaster is predicated on successful multi-agency coordination, which in turn relies on agencies to understand ‘what is going on’, generally known as Situation Awareness (SA). SA can be viewed from an individual, team or a systems perspective. Research in other safety critical environments and multi-team systems that have adopted a systems thinking perspective indicates that Distributed Situation Awareness (DSA) may be a suitable theoretical framework to use when attempting to understand and optimise multi-agency emergency response (ER) systems. Despite its popularity in other domains, it is unclear the extent to which the DSA perspective has been applied in the ER context. The aim of this review is to provide an overview of the current literature in the area of SA in multi-agency disaster response, and to establish the extent to which the theory of DSA has been examined in this context. A structured search of the literature identified only one study that applied the established DSA methodology to their research. Findings from this review reveal a knowledge gap exists in investigating SA from a systems perspective in ER and therefore future research utilising the theory of DSA in this domain is warranted.