I went to the British Canoeing Event Safety Workship last night run by Dave Rosseter and the SCA. Here’s some notes for my own interest and memory.
Events runs by SCA affiliated clubs are covered for liability by the Perkins & Slade Insurance so if someone dies at an event the insurance covers you being sued. Following some incidents the insurance company asked for this workshop to happen so clubs at least have an idea how to check the events they run are safe.
An event is defined as an activity run by the club involving non-club members and outwith the BCU terms of reference. (Or run by an SCA committee.)
When running an event we have a duty of care to look after those involved.
We discussed a chain of responsibility which typically has an event organiser in the middle and club committee and SCA above them and volunteers below them.
We discussed the need to get authorisation of events, at a club that might be by the committee or at an AGM.
We discussed risk assessments which for each risk should include likelihood and seriousness as well as mitigation and whether that mitigation is proportionate.
We look at the 5 stages of an event
- Decision to run – why do you want to run it?
- Application and Authority – internal (club committee, safety officer) and external (property owners etc)
- Pre-event considerations (roles needing filled, equipment needed, briefing volunteers, facilities needed, training needed)
- Day of event (people in the right place, what happens when something unexpected occurred)
- Post event (review afterwards and where that review needs to be sent)
There was a slide about checklists for events but not much details. I found one on the HSE website: checklist for village and community halls.
The acronym CALM was covered which are principles involved in dynamic risk assessment (and are similar to leadership principles of CLAP):
- Commuinication
- Avoidance
- Line of Site
- Management
There was a slide on people’s roles and span of control but not much detail on this.
There’s a load of resources that are due to come out to us. Useful stuff is on the HSE website and the gov.uk website such as the guide to organising community events.
It was an interesting enough workshop but I’m not convinced I learnt much, we already do all this in our club and many of the topics weren’t gone into in much detail.
Interesting to see British Canoeing use a photo from the FCC website in their slides, I wonder who authorised that and what their span of control was.