Rebreather Forum 3.0

Gareth Lock attended Rebreather Forum 3.0 over the weekend 18-20 May 2012 in Orlando Florida.

The overall goals of Rebreather Forum were to:

• Contribute to rebreather diving safety and reduce incidents among all diver groups using this technology.
• Advance rebreather diving state-of-the-art with respect to the technology and how we use it.
• Improve the technical and human factors aspects of rebreather diving.
• Appropriately expand the access of rebreathers to diver groups that can benefit from it.
• Provide a common informational foundation that the dive community can stand on as we develop and use rebreathers.

A key theme that ran through the conference is that we, as a community, need to develop a much better safety culture.  In James Reason's article "Achieving a Safety Culture: Theory and Practice" (Work and Stress. 1998. Vol 12 No 3) he describes a safety culture as:

"Uttal's (1983) definition of safety culture captures most of its essentials: 'Shared values (what is important) and beliefs (how things work) that interact with an organization's structures and control systems to produce behavioural norms (the way we do things around here)'. The literature (Bate 1992, Thompson et al. 1996) suggests at least two ways of treating safety culture: as something an organization is (the beliefs, attitudes and values of its members regarding the pursuit of safety), and as something that an organization has (the structures, practices, controls and policies designed to enhance safety). Both are essential for achieving an effective safety culture. However, as shall be argued, the latter is easier to manipulate than the former (Hofstede 1994). It is hard to change the attitudes and beliefs of adults by direct methods of persuasion. But acting and doing, shaped by organizational controls, can lead to thinking and believing."

The last sentence is key. It needs the buy-in, direction and leadership from those at the top of the community to make this work. Individuals such as myself have an influence, but only at a small and local level.

Another key area was more and better quality data. Whilst we can share the data we currently have, and there were some very good pledges made at the conference, that only concerns old data. We need to get better at collecting new data.  This is why in the UK the Diving Incident and Safety Management System (DISMS) has been launched with development costs provided by the diving community, in the US there is the DAN Incident Reporting System (http://DAN.org/DivingIncident) and in the Asia Pacific area DAN have launched the Non Fatal Diving Incident Reporting System (NFDIR). These are all focussing on Non-fatal incidents, incidents where divers are still around to talk about what happened, and more importantly, why something happened.  We can only develop new practices or techniques to fix the problems out there, if we understand why something happened, not just the 'what'.