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Interagency Coordination and Occupational Stress for Police and Volunteer Search and Rescue Personnel in Missing Person Operations

Interviews with police and volunteer SAR personnel found collaboration can share expertise and workload, but delayed tasking, unclear roles, incompatible practices and communication failures also create operational and occupational strain.

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Collaboration Helps, Collaboration Strains: Interagency Coordination and Occupational Stress for Police and Volunteer Search and Rescue Personnel in Missing Persons Operations

  • Author(s): Lorna Ferguson; Dasha Guliak; Janelle Coultes; Chiron Pugh

  • Source: Occupational Health

  • Publisher(s): MDPI

  • Publication date: September 2026

  • Country: Canada

Why it matters: It supports treating police–volunteer interfaces as an operational design issue, not merely a relationship issue—particularly early callout, roles, clue protection, information flow and debrief.

Operational transferability: Strongly relevant to police-led volunteer SAR, including the UK, though local command authorities and volunteer structures differ.

Important limitations: Qualitative evidence; it reports participant perspectives rather than measuring incident outcomes or comparing models of coordination.

Training influence: Build joint scenarios around a late callout, incomplete initial briefing and potential evidence contamination. Assess role clarity, escalation, task acceptance and what information must be confirmed before deployment.

SAR training sections: Initial Incident Picture; resource selection and tasking; briefing and confirmation of understanding; communications; multi-agency working; organisational learning.

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