Diving is Risky Business
RAID’s UNIQUE QA SYSTEM HELPS… Playing in water can be dangerous. There are risks associated with diving of every description. This is something we have to accept and learn to deal with if we want to go diving. The goal of any RAID instructor is to deliver this message, but, more importantly, it’s to dive students the knowledge, skills, and techniques to manage those risks. Making them disappear is impossible. The best any of us can do is to identify, mitigate, and avoid, but risk is always a factor to consider. RAID professionals are chosen to represent the agency and to deliver the RAID brand of training for many reasons: skill, empathy, knowledge, spirit, desire. These traits are probably shared by the majority of instructors across the diving industry, but we try to go further. In part, student safety is a function of standards and sticking to them. RAID’s standards exceed by far the minimums accepted as ‘good enough’ across the industry. Shortcuts, courses that are hurried and packed to the maximum possible, are discouraged and policed heavily. RAID students, every one of them, takes part in that process by default. They are required to complete a questionnaire about their training as part of the final course assessment. That is 100 percent of students, not a select few. RAID cannot guarantee student safety, no agency can, but we come closer than most to being able to make that promise.
Risk Management
THERE’S MORE TO IT THAN ASSIGNING BLAME… Playing around water is risky. It really makes very little difference whether the game is freediving, recreational diving on a shallow reef, or navigating through the twisted remains of a battleship sitting in the dark at 80 metres. It can be dangerous, and if something goes wrong, it’s human nature to look for someone to blame. However, assigning blame is very different to actually fixing the problem. In fact, blaming ‘some clown’ for an accident or a near miss is as far away from fixing a issue as one can get. The goal of every RAID instructor regardless of what they teach, is fixing problems. In fact, the goal should be to manage the risk before a problem shows its ugly head. Here are some simple steps to help make that happen. Unfortunately, we can never eliminate all risk from diving. Slippery poolsides, trips over an equipment bag left in a gangway, cylinders falling off a bench, the consequences of dehydration, bumping into firecoral or the sharp edges of a shipwreck’s hull: we cannot take them away. All we can do, as divers or instructors, is work at making the risks associated with this wonderful adventure, acceptable. And that’s what risk management is all about. #Theraidway™ MANY THANKS TO MHA CONSULTING FOR THE EXCELLENT GRAPHIC https://www.mha-it.com/AND KUDOS TO PASH BAKER FOR THE ORIGINAL IDEA FOR THIS POST
