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.

对任何灾难的有效应急响应取决于成功的多机构协调，而该协调又依赖于机构了解“正在发生的事情”，通常被称为情势感知（SA）。可以从个人，团队或系统的角度查看SA。在其他已采用系统思想的安全关键环境和多团队系统中进行的研究表明，分布式态势感知（DSA）可能是尝试理解和优化多机构紧急响应（ER）系统时使用的合适理论框架。尽管它在其他领域很受欢迎，但尚不清楚在ER环境中DSA观点的应用程度。这次审查的目的是概述SA在多机构灾难响应方面的最新文献，并确定在这种情况下对DSA理论的研究程度。对文献的结构化检索仅发现一项研究，该研究将既定的DSA方法论应用于他们的研究。这次审查的结果表明，从ER的系统角度出发，在研究SA方面存在知识差距，因此，有必要在此领域利用DSA的理论进行进一步的研究。