Event Safety, BOF Training

[graeme]

I can't see how it's unreasonable to expect someone who wants to plan or organise events to attend a 6-hour course.

You've obviously never been to one of these courses then. As an education professional I have the delightful experience of attending these things, normally run by people much less experienced than the dragooned participants. Two things are for sure...

1/ Once one discusses a situation where the right action isn't bleedin' obvious once you've read the manual*, the instructor will (quite rightly) tell you that you need to use your own judgment.

2/ No matter how little attention you pay, you'll never fail the course.

* Here, BOF's rather splendid guides for organisers which you can read in rather less than 6 hours without even having to drive to Birmingham.

someone who wants to organise an event

I never met anyone like that. Plenty of us do it grudgingly from a sense of obligation, "want to see an event happen" certainly, but "want to organise?" Nope.

[EddieH]

Well said Graeme. "Wants to organise and event"

Adrian reckons that "attending" a 6 hour course (with no doubt many more hours getting there) is something that will appeal to budding organisers.

I loathe our safety mad risk averse blame anyone you can think of culture*, but at least it sounds as though in the SOA the intention is that the requirements are going to be easy to fulfil. Hopefully we won't lose more than 10% of our dragooned organisers, although I fear it might be nearer 50%.

How does recording on a risk assessment sheet that a thunderstorm is possible assist in any way

I am supposedly qualified as I have attended a course, and frankly it was everything that Graeme said.

* And this does NOT mean that I plan yellow courses beyond their standard, and it does not mean I run courses over invisible cliffs etc. but I do that orienteering has an inherent very tiny risk of serious and possibly fatal incident which any adult entering should be clearly able to realise as should a guardian of a child. (This risk is almost certainly far lower than that of driving to the event.)

[roadrunner]

Every year, at my club's AGM, a list of venues for summer evening training events is displayed (permissions etc having already been obtained), and people are invited to come forward and volunteer to organise them. This doesn't result in a great rush of people!! If you said, by the way if you volunteer you're also going to have to attend a training course first, I can't imagine that the numbers wouldn't decrease even further. If you want to get people to take that first step towards organising events, you've got to make it as easy as possible for them. And if they don't take the first step, will you ever get anyone new wanting to organise a major event (for which some form of training might be more justifiable)?

[SeanC]

Several pages back someone (Seabird?) informed us that local/level4/D etc events wont require organisers to go on this course. I agree you have to make it as easy as possible for new organisers.

[pete.owens]

I'm starting to get fed up of the guys who whine about our safety culture.

+1

There has been a long running campaign in the right wing media to try to remove any responsibility employers have to consider the safety of their operations. This usually takes the form of finding (or inventing) some petty rule instituted by some minor jobsworth and claiming that this is down to "elf 'n safety" laws (preferably originating in Europe). The HSE has a set of posters aimed at putting the record straight on such myths: http://www.hse.gov.uk/myth/.

In such reports risk assessments are always dismissed as "box ticking" - an argument that several here have deployed. (Though if the impression that risk assessment just involves ticking boxes is widespread amongst those responsible for putting on O events then this rather suggest that there really is a need for formal training)

I would rather hope that no orienteering club is organising events while paying no attention to the management of risk - as some posters seem to advocate.

In case you haven't noticed, O does have risks, but none of us are talking about making orienteering events difficult to arrange. Can't you see that it's unreasonable to expect anyone to insure an orienteering event if it's run by one guy who just plonks twenty flags on a mountain and tells a dozen teenagers not to get lost? You may say that you're a brilliant planner/organiser who hasn't killed anyone (yet) but how is the insurer supposed to tell?

Quite - if things go wrong then the insurance company stands to lose a large sum of money.

On the other hand, I can't see how it's unreasonable to expect someone who wants to plan or organise events to attend a 6-hour course. Not to do so is unfair on novice officials who have a lot of things to take into consideration in planning/organising an event, and unfair on controllers who are supposed to be there to control events, not to teach planners.

And I think here, a throw away remark in a BOF committee meeting seems to have been taken out of all proportion.

I doubt very much that insurers know the specific duties that planner, controller, organiser, starter, downloader and so on have at an an orienteering event let alone be in a position to specify which of those officials need to be trained to what level with regard to safety. However, it is completely reasonable to expect that a suitably competent official does take responsibility to ensure that risks are managed appropriately.

Given that risk assessment is a straight forward common sense process, I would not have thought this would require any formal training (certainly not 6 hours worth), and is just one of the many things that event officials need to learn on the job.

The one official who should be experienced and will have been subject to some degree of formal training and will be familiar with both the competition terrain and assembly arrangements is the controller. (Doesn't training for controllers already include safety?). This doesn't mean that they have to mitigate the risks themselves (any more than they should be planning the courses) - just to satisfy themselves that the job has been done. A degree of oversight that is rather less onerous than checking that a planners tag really is on the SW side of the correct 1.5m boulder, 3km from the nearest car park.

[lindseyk]

Whilst I agree that introducing too much red-tape into our sport isn’t a good thing can I just stick up for the need for event officials to have the right attitude to risk assessment. It shouldn’t be just a tick box exercise to satisfy BOF/the controller/the insurers….it should be done to satisfy yourself ! If something goes badly pear-shaped at your event that you could have prevented then (a) you will be held responsible and, worse (b) you will feel very very guilty. And by then it’s too late.

[EddieH]

It's astonishing how polarised this topic is.

I believe that our litigation blame culture has seen the end of over 50% of after school activities, and is in severe danger of losing a high proportion of potential officials.

I know I stopped teaching because of it, and that is precisely why I will have nothing to do with coaching. Some will think that unreasonable but it is a fact. I am not unique.

Nuff said.

[seabird]

I learnt a little more about the "risks" of using the BOF risk assessment form this weekend; based on the needs of different "stakeholders" to be reassured at different times in the event preparation process.

A well organised permissions secretary informed me that when he seeks permissions for races, up to 2 years in advance, he sends a risk assessment form that he has prepared to the landowners, as that is something that they request at that time along with a copy of the insurance policy. This is usually long before any race official has been appointed, so no real assessment of risk can have been undertaken.

When said officials are appointed this completed form is then sent to the race organiser.

This approach runs the real risk of race officials considering that because a form is completed risk has actually been assessed, and steps taken to minimise it, and thus may fail to do the job themselves.

[AndyO]

Seabird, the landowner (or his agent) is only doing what a reasonable landowner should - trying to ensure that people going on to their land to organise an event have some undertsanding of H&S. Of course you can't give him the final RA so far back from the event, but you can give him a generic one in a structured form that gives him some confidence. As Lyndsey said, the RA is not just for the insurance or anyone else, it is for the organiser's peace of mind. Whether you send a copy of the final updated form to the landowner is up to you - I have known agents who insist on it, and frankly, good for them.

[awk]

It's astonishing how polarised this topic is.

I think it's polarised, because the experience of risk assessment etc is polarised. As you imply, risk assessment and H&S paperwork has gone mad in places like schools. However, risk assessment used as a tool, rather than a wodge of paper to beat people over the head with by paranoid jobsworths, is simply good practice, that we should be doing pretty much automatically. And that is what should be the aim, and hopefully is.

To that extent, I think Adrian's "6-hour course" comment highlights exactly what I was trying to say should NOT be used as training in my previous post. This is something that should be built in to standard training (on the job for most planners and organisers, in their training or as part of updating for controllers, plus on-line for easy access), not as some whole day adjunct. I, for one, would simply not be prepared to be an event official if that whole day training model was adopted - just as I've done similar to you and currently not renewed my license to practice coaching because of all the on-going additional training, paperwork and expense required there.

[DaveK]

Ever since somebody said to me (sadly; and in a very knowing way) at a training course (work related) - 'It might be too late when you end up in front of the Coroner's Court explaining why you did or did not do something', I've generally erred on the side of caution in everything I've been involved in planning and organising (including Orienteering events). Proper risk assessments and some 'training' must be a minimum standard surely?

[Mrs H]

This is a fascinating debate and i have yet to formulate my personal stance on the matter - but I would be fascinated to know how you risk assess so-called adrenalin sports - not just the sky diving base jumping type but down to and certainly including mountain biking (which seems to account for a fair few broken limbs I've come across in the last couple of years,) rugby, (which has immobilised more than a few club juniors when I most needed them), and ultimately I suppose orienteering.

How do you risk assess something when part of the attraction is taking the risk?

Or is a risk only a risk when it is likely to result in a court case?

[Sunlit Forres]

Many folk get in to sport as a release from the stresses of daily life and escape from bureaucracy and can do without health and safety being rammed down their throat.

I think Awk's dead right when he says that safety aspects need to be embedded in to standard training. That way people would be much more prepared to accept it as just one more facet of making an event happen, be you an organiser making sure there's no bull in the field or be you a planner taking your courses well away from 100 foot cliffs or across bottomless marshes.

[madmike]

Good question Mrs H,

in my view, the whole point of risk management is that you assess the risk and manage it. You can then decide what to do. Mitigate it, transfer it, eliminate it or actually just accept it. My beef is with those who equate risk management to risk elimination i.e. who are completely risk adverse.

As you allude to, adventure sport is most probably about accepting some risk and mitigating some more but you cannot eliminate risk in toto otherwise it would be called living in a large ball of coton wool not adventure sport.

Any one who thinks you can completely eliminate risk and indeed accidents is living in cloud cuckoo land. Risk, to a greater or lesser degree is inherent in everything we do.

Assessing risk is about applying your intellect, experience and training; and of course that remarkably uncommon thing called common sense. Risk management is (and always has been) an inherent element of running an orienteering event and with what you've organised you've done it loads - just no one asked you to fill in a form labelled risk assessment to prove it afterwards in court when the insurance company charge you (BOF) to mitigate the risk and simultaneously try and transfer the risk back to you (Club/Officials) - a perfect crime.

I wrote my first paper on risk managment in 1991 btw and it's not turned out to be the complete bollocks I said it would be back then; however, there is a danger I might be proved right if the risk-adverse nanny-stateists get their way.

Training is good particularly for novice organisers - need to be careful not to drive away organisers by replicating the demands of coaching scheme. Law of unintended consequences and all that....

Here ends the Madmike sermon on risk managment.

[Roger]

Given that risk assessment is a straight forward common sense process, I would not have thought this would require any formal training (certainly not 6 hours worth)...

The safety course that I attended last weekend at Longmoor was 3½ hours, so 6 hours is likely to be a bit of an over-estimate. I thought that it was appropriate, although I probably learned more during the discussion (e.g. how long it takes two people to sweep-search 1 square kilometre of forest) than from the formal course material.

This doesn't mean that they [controllers] have to mitigate the risks themselves (any more than they should be planning the courses) - just to satisfy themselves that the job has been done. A degree of oversight that is rather less onerous than checking that a planners tag really is on the SW side of the correct 1.5m boulder, 3km from the nearest car park.

True, but I can't be the only person who'd rather check boulders than check paperwork.