Decide before you deploy, not during.
Distance from the front line is no longer a guarantee for safety. Your security protocols must catch up. This page sets out what duty of care requires in a volatile environment, the components that actually reduce exposure, and the worksheet we use to run the process ourselves.
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Personal Risk Assessment Worksheet
The instrument we use in our own pre-deployment process. It takes one person or one team through identification, rating, go/no-go, mitigation and contingency, and produces a document you can file. It’s free.
What duty of care actually requires
Duty of care is not insurance plus goodwill. In a high-risk environment it rests on six obligations, and an insurer, regulator or court will test all six after an incident.
Assess before you commit.
A documented, deployment-specific assessment for this route, this site, this team.
Informed consent.
People must know the specific risks they are accepting, in concrete terms, before they agree to travel.
The right to refuse without penalty.
Anyone can decline a deployment or withdraw from one. If refusing carries a career cost, the protection is theoretical.
Competence, equipment and cover.
Training matched to the actual threat, kit that works, medical and evacuation cover that functions in country and at 2 a.m.
Named decision authority.
One person holds final go/no-go. The team knows who, before departure — not during an incident.
Aftercare and record.
Incident response, psychological support and decompression, and a timestamped trail for every deployment.
Five steps, under an hour, before every deployment
Identify the risks specifically. Physical, environmental, medical, legal, reputational, data and communications, cultural. Named for this trip, not “war”.
Rate them. Likelihood against impact, so the conversation moves from “it’s dangerous” to what is likely and what would be severe.
Decide go or no-go against criteria set in advance. If the criteria are written after the trip is proposed, they will be adjusted to fit it.
Mitigate what ranks highest. Concrete measures, named owners, deadlines.
Plan for the situation changing after departure. Loss of contact, rally points, check-in intervals, extraction triggers.
What actually reduces exposure
The measures below are what mitigation looks like in practice. Most are cheap. All of them have to exist before departure to be worth anything.
An assessment only works if people can execute it.
Skills under stress come from rehearsal, not from standing next to experienced colleagues. Junior and newly hired staff need the training most, and preparation only works before exposure, not during it. We run HEAT, HEFAT, HEAT with Drones, tactical first aid and journey management — in Ukraine, and in Portugal and Denmark so teams can prepare in advance and in a safe location.
1 of 9. Shelter, mapped in advance. Every planned location has a named shelter, identified before the team enters the building.