LEARNING FROM EACH OTHER
Whether it’s a skipped checklist that leads to an equipment mishap or a miscalculation resulting in buoyancy issues, we have all made mistakes as divers. No matter how many years we’ve been diving and how many dives we have logged, we are all fallible. Small mistakes commonly result in minor annoyances, but in some cases, they can lead to complex cascades that result in injuries and emergency calls to DAN.
DAN receives thousands of emergency and nonemergency calls each year, but countless events occur that never result in a call to DAN. That’s thousands of experiences that the dive community could learn from that were never shared – until now. The DAN team has established the Online Incident Reporting System, which enables you to take an active role in our research process.
If you’ve experienced a diving incident, I encourage you to spend five minutes to complete the anonymous online incident report. The five minutes you spend sharing your story could very well save a life.
As your dive safety association, DAN created this global initiative in support of incident prevention and incident management to bring heightened awareness to diver safety. This critical tool, developed by our team of research experts, provides the platform we need to capture detailed information about unforeseen safety issues in novel diving practices, whether recreational, breathhold, technical or public safety.
This data helps us identify trends and determine critical routes of exploration for dive medical and safety research. It is a central repository of information that helps DAN effectively serve the global diving community. By capturing these experiences we are expanding the resources available to help you make informed decisions about your dive practices. This initiative allows DAN to gather information about possible diving equipment failures, and it will strengthen our basis for human-factor safety research.
The data gathered through this system offers important insights that help us tailor our efforts to developing and deploying essential prevention strategies.
Each case submitted presents a learning opportunity. When you visit the reporting-system landing page, DAN.org/Diving-Incidents, you can review the real-life experiences divers submitted through the system as well as expert commentary. The page also features Incident Insight articles and offers expert analysis of real events, their management and tangible steps for avoidance. The DAN team has also developed downloadable guides on health risk factors, safety protocols and equipment testing. As the leader in dive safety, we believe it is important to offer the community a means of sharing information so that through collective learning experiences, we can enhance the safety of our sport.