Ep 130: What's New in ASIM Advanced
Episode 130
Published Jun 4, 2026
Duration: 10:19
Episode Summary
Active Shooter Incident Management (ASIM) Advanced is a three‑day course where your whole response system trains to command and coordinate an active shooter response together in realistic simulations. In this episode, Bill Godfrey and Kevin Nichols explain how new hands‑on practical exercises on Day 1 help the “lightbulb moment” click earlier, how the training scenarios build up to a complex coordinated attack across multiple sites, and how new environments, including a fully built‑out hospital, make the exercises more realistic. They also cover the expanded material for emergency managers, public information officers, dispatch, intelligence, and aviation.
Episode Notes
You cannot afford to wait for a real active shooter incident to find out how well your agencies coordinate. The updated Active Shooter Incident Management (ASIM) Advanced is where your agencies become one coordinated team, ready to run a real response together.
In this episode of the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast, Bill Godfrey and Kevin Nichols walk through what has changed in this three‑day course. Their focus is simple: give you a clearer view of how your teams performs when law enforcement, fire, EMS, dispatch, and command are all working together.
They also discuss:
- New practical exercises that develop skills before running the full scenarios
- How the number and order of scenarios have changed so performance improves earlier and difficulty builds over time
- New content for emergency managers, public information officers, dispatch, intelligence, and aviation, including drone operations
- A special hazards block focused on active shooter incidents in healthcare environments
- New environments in the simulator, including a fully built‑out hospital, to practice those challenges in a live exercise setting
Learn more about ASIM Advanced at: https://ncier.org/asim/advanced?utm_source=sc
View this episode on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/xeKwv7HeHpw
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:The ASIM Advanced Class is an actual DHS certified class. It goes through a meticulous review process, review and approval process that is very, very stringent and includes a NIMS ICS review to make sure that all of the material, all of the content and all of the components are NIMS and ICS compliant. And we've been through this several times already, but as we come on the air today, we got noticed yesterday that we have completed that process. And the ASIM, the New ASIM Advanced, has been re-certified for another three years under the DHS certified curriculum from the National Training and Education Division, which is ministered under FEMA. But that's not really the big news because we made a lot of changes to ASIM Advanced. Let's talk about day one, Kevin. What all changed on day one of ASIM Advanced?
Kevin Nichols:
There's a lot of changes and there's a lot of stuff to be really excited about. What we did is we launched into it and we wanted to provide some more hands-on practical exercise to take advantage of that in-person face-to-face training that we talked about in ASIM Basics. The morning of day one, there are multiple practical exercises where we get up out of our seats and we actually walk through several practical exercises to get people spun up and ready to move into the exercises in the simulator.
Bill Godfrey:
And at the end of the day, what drove that change is we saw in the metrics, in the data, in feedback from participants, we saw a very clear pattern over the years that we've been delivering the ASIM Advanced course, which is a three day course, that it was basically lunchtime on day two when the light bulb started going on for everybody. And they're like, oh, oh, I get it. And that was great because it still meant you had the rest of day two and then you had all of day three to carry 'em home on the repetition and really lock that in. But we challenged ourselves this year when we were rewriting and it said, how do we get the light switch turned on on day one instead of waiting for day two? How do we get to that on day one? And that was what led to a lot of these, what I'll call little mini hands-on exercise components to give people a more tangible understanding of the things that we were asking them to learn so that they had something before they started the repetition of live scenarios. We broke apart these micro skills. Talk about some of those stations that we're focused on.
Kevin Nichols:
Well, we broke it out from the beginning, right? So we talk about that first arriving officer. One of the things that we had noticed through multiple scenarios is getting people to give us a good size up report, a really good LCAN at the beginning of your arriving on scene. We were missing that in a lot of the scenarios. So we designed a scenario to help build that skill and practice and train it before we jump into the scenario where people may be unfamiliar with this computers and have other things on their mind. So we really push that out. Then we go in and we really do a, we do some breakouts on the staging skills. How do we run staging? How should staging operate? And what are the functions of that staging position?
Bill Godfrey:
That's a perfect example, the staging one. Previously, we had a lecture block in there that included an exercise that you did at your desk or where, at your table, wherever you were sitting. So it had the kind of the foundation material, and then it had this little mini exercise you did in your book. And we said, well, wait a minute. We've got these staging boards in the classroom. Why don't we just get everybody up at the boards and actually have them run through as if they were staging managers.
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah. Breaks 'em down into smaller groups. Let them get a little bit more instructor to, or a little bit smaller instructor to student ratio so that they get a little bit more attention and it lets them practice that skill in a less stressful environment than doing it for the first time in an actual live scenario.
Bill Godfrey:
Continuing on, we've got some law enforcement specific stuff that we've obviously isolated out, but on the fire EMS side, you've seen it and we've all seen it 'cause we've been talking about it for a while, which is why we're putting together a research study on this to kind of show what we've found. The metrics, the actual measurements and performance of EMTs and paramedics in triaging and performing mass casualty triage has been, shall we say, suboptimal.
Kevin Nichols:
I think suboptimal is a good work.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. And so one of the exercises that we've done is focused just on that triage assessment skill, but not in the traditional sense. 'cause there's gotta be people listening to us right now that are thinking, well, wait a minute. You know, we use START, we use SALT, we use this method. Great. You've done that and now you have six reds. Which one's going first?
Kevin Nichols:
The metrics we were looking at, you speak of the patient report in the Advanced class. And the idea that we want, not necessarily just to get everybody off scene as quickly as possible. That's obviously one of our goal. We wanna get all the injured people off scene as rapidly as possible. But what we realized was it's also important to get the most critically injured people off scene first and to those higher levels of care.
Bill Godfrey:
And it's not enough to just say, send all the reds first, because not all reds are created equal. You've got to add in medical judgment to your triage system. Whatever system you're using, START SALT, doesn't matter. They're all doing a gross first pass. So great. You got six reds, you got eight reds, you got five yellows, you got 10 greens. Pick your numbers. I don't care. Your first ambulance is here ready to go. Who's going on the first ambulance? And how are your ambulances staffed? Can you take two reds on the same ambulance or can you only take one red and then you have to give them something else? Does your jurisdiction allow you to transport a green patient in the front seat of the vehicle or in the observer's chair in the back seat? Do you even have a bench seat in your ambulances? Some of the new ambulances replace the bench seats with captain chairs. And so this becomes a very local issue depending on how their system is structured. And all of that starts with basic triage skills at the EMT and paramedic level.
Kevin Nichols:
Absolutely. So we took that and broke it off into a, again, a breakout skill while we're teaching law enforcement officers law enforcement skills, we're gonna take the fire and EMS folks and run them through that MCI exercise you were discussing.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, I'm very excited, very, very excited about that. I think people are gonna really, really enjoy that. And then we've got a couple of other exercises that come in right behind that. But all, all of them have the same goal. Is that when we start live scenarios on the afternoon of day one, you're starting with a better understanding of the pieces, of the individual pieces that we're now asking you to put together. And the hope is we're gonna get that light switch turned on on day one instead of day two.
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah, we've actually shortened the number of scenarios. We took 'em from 11 to 10, but really in our, some of our previous classes, we were noticing people weren't performing as well on that first scenario. So we're hoping that taking the time to do these breakouts and do these practical exercises is gonna have them performing like lights out on that first scenario.
Bill Godfrey:
And that's not all we changed. When you move on to day two, we've made a whole bunch of changes to day two in the material and the content and the scope. We've included information for emergency managers, for PIOs, for dispatch, for intelligence, for aviation, which includes not just helicopters, but also drone operations. A lot of things to watch out for there. We included a special hazards block, which directly addresses incidents in a healthcare environment because boy, are those ever different? And there are a lot of challenges if you've got an active shooter event in a hospital.
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah, there's a lot of challenges a lot of people maybe have not thought about. And we bring those, those challenges up and we have a discussion about them and get people ready to at least have the discussion at their place to where they can pre-plan it before it happens.
Bill Godfrey:
And on day three, made quite a few changes there as well. We changed up the order of the scenarios, we changed up the severity and the difficulty of the scenarios. And so that every day, every scenario, it gets a little harder, little harder, a little more involved. We build them up from the beginning, from a very simple scenario to the end where they're facing a complex coordinated attack with multiple attackers simultaneously attacking multiple sites.
Kevin Nichols:
We also had the opportunity to add a couple of new environments in our scenarios, so it's not the same environments. There's some new places out there for us to go and respond to.
Bill Godfrey:
You mean the hospital?
Kevin Nichols:
Ah, yes.
Bill Godfrey:
Very, very excited about that one.
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah. It's gonna be an interesting change.
Bill Godfrey:
It is. It is. It's a full operational hospital that gives you the full exterior parking lots, parking garages, the whole big building, lobby, ER, OR, ICU, MedSurg floor all fully built out.
Kevin Nichols:
It gives us the opportunity to implement some of those special circumstances you were talking about that healthcare response and really practice it and see it in a live exercise.
Bill Godfrey:
That's the ASIM Advanced changes. Now, all of that stuff we've just talked about is done. It's out there and it is, well, now that ASIM Advanced got approved, it's going to be going live in the next few weeks.