RESEARCH, EDUCATION & MEDICINE

If you and a buddy have ever been momentarily lost on a night dive, you understand how darkness can prolong a problem you encounter underwater. In these continuingly uncertain times, darkness as obscuring as the ocean at night has surrounded all of us at one point or another. For divers, this darkness may have come from fear about our future fitness to dive, the survival of our businesses and livelihoods, or the health and safety of ourselves and those near and dear to us.

Being lost during a night dive, even briefly, can make you feel as though you’re at the mercy of an unforgiving sea. If you have experienced it but you’re reading this article, you probably didn’t panic uncontrollably or give up, and you likely stuck with your training and solved your problem. This quick adaptation and composure under pressure led you back to your starting point, which you were able to find with the help of a guiding light – perhaps the one marking the anchor line.

Just as uncomfortable and even scary dives force us to become better divers, bad and uncertain times force us to think, adapt and grow. If I’ve learned anything about divers over the years, it’s that they can handle fear better than most people and use innovative thinking to quickly adapt and conquer almost any challenge thrown their way.

Although the aftershocks of this pandemic continue to be felt throughout the dive community, DAN remains committed to guiding divers to a better, safer diving future – much like a light on an anchor line can lead you back to safety.

To continue supporting divers,

DAN’s doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians remain on the line for those in need of emergency medical assistance. Throughout this pandemic our medical services call centre has been flooded with dive safety and dive medical queries related to COVID-19. Our staff remains hard at work to provide reliable information to divers worldwide.

DAN researchers and dive safety experts have also been creating and publishing guidelines and tools for divers to use as they consider getting back in the water. As discoveries about the novel coronavirus are made, our staff is working to identify and circulate science-based recommendations that allow a healthy and safe return to diving. To keep divers informed and prepared, we’ve spent the past few months publishing numerous medical, risk management and dive safety articles for divers and dive business owners, and we’ve produced webinars to directly connect our specialists to divers who can benefit from our guidance.

Our medical experts have been working with the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS) and many other organisations to update and refine the World Recreational

Scuba Training Council (WRSTC) Diver Medical Participant Questionnaire – the form divers complete when they enrol in any dive training course. In this collaborative effort, our doctors also helped update and refine the WRSTC Diver Medical Physician’s Evaluation Form and the Diving Medical Guidance reference materials, which are peerreviewed resources for physicians seeking useful information about how specific conditions relate to diving.

These updated materials incorporate the most up-to-date dive medical recommendations into forms that divers and instructors use to prevent unnecessary injuries. The forms now include provisions and guidelines for evaluating divers who have had COVID-19 or may be experiencing symptoms.

In addition to this collaborative effort to help prevent dive injuries, DAN’s research and medical experts have published the Schedule for Lifelong Medical Fitness to Dive Evaluation, which is designed to promote divers’ medical fitness to dive throughout their lives.

This reference is intended for use by divers, dive professionals and doctors to establish a schedule for medical questionnaires and physical evaluations based on age and other relevant factors, which helps promote divers’ safety through their entire dive careers.

DAN Research has also published the 2019 DAN Annual Diving Report, which is a free download on www.DAN.org. This report analyses scuba, freediving and rebreather incident and fatality data from around the world and includes real case reports that any diver can read and understand. We publish the report every year to improve understanding of dive accidents and to help divers prevent and mitigate them. Through our publications and media outreach, we hope to empower and guide divers not only to get through these times but also to emerge more resilient and better prepared.

While our medical professionals and dive safety experts have been working to help divers remain safe for their entire diving lives, our insurance teams have been firing on all cylinders to ensure that DAN members continue to have full access to their membership benefits and dive accident insurance policies. Although many people assume that no one is diving right now, data suggest otherwise: Insurance claims for the first quarter of 2020 were 50 percent higher than during that same period in 2019. In the second quarter we saw costlier claims, primarily due to increased expenses of evacuation and treatment – a direct result of extra precautions required by the pandemic.

Thanks to the continued support of our members, DAN can staff a 24/7 emergency hotline for divers worldwide, facilitate emergency evacuations and provide answers to divers’ medical questions. We can conduct life-saving research and collaborate with organisations around the world to develop interventions that make diving safer. We can reach out to dive professionals to help them mitigate risks and safely reopen their businesses.

We can continue to cover dive accident costs and medical expenses when other insurance cannot.

With your support, DAN can remain available to divers, as we have been for 40 years, as a light in the darkness that guides divers to a safer diving future.