National Diving Officer Sophie Rennie and Head of Diving Sophie Heptonstall explain how BSAC courses are continually refined
TWOSOPHIES
The evolution of instruction
National Diving Officer Sophie Rennie and Head of Diving Sophie Heptonstall explain how BSAC courses are continually refined
THE QUESTION:
Can you tell us a little about the updating of BSAC courses and grades? Why do we need to update the courses, how do you decide which ones to focus on, and what’ s in the pipeline at the moment?
Sophie Rennie answers
That’ s a very interesting question, for which I have an answer in three parts. 1. Why do we need to update the courses? Well, things change and BSAC being the National Governing Body means we must ensure we stay up-to-date with everything. Take, for example, First Aid and CPR, which requires more changes than any other course. 2. How do we decide which courses to focus on? We have a five-year strategy and the development and update of all our courses is added into the strategy so that we know what’ s next in the pipeline. We also listen to the membership and any offers to help from our wonderful volunteers. Sometimes this may expedite any changes or re-writes. 3. What’ s in the pipeline? Well, I am excited to tell you that we are focusing heavily on the Advanced Diver qualification. It hasn’ t had a re-write for many years, and all the other diving levels have- so this is AD’ s turn! We’ ve also just moved the lectures and presentations for the Instructor Foundation Course online, thus enabling the face-to-face practical part of the course to be done in one day. This stands to reduce accommodation costs big time!
Sophie Heptonstall expands
One of the great things about diving is that it’ s a sport where technology and research has really seen the overall industry evolve from kit to training. Just like the underwater world we explore, the world of diving is always moving, and we want our training to keep pace with the latest safety information and also embrace any technical developments that can enhance our members diving experiences.
There are some significant reasons we update courses:
■ Safety first We’ re constantly learning from incident reports, medical research, and safety studies. If there’ s a safer or better way to do something, we’ ll make sure it’ s built into our training. A good example of this is the identification of Immersion Pulmonary Oedema from incident reporting and the subsequent inclusion of this information into BSAC Training so that divers could recognise and provide relevant First Aid. It’ s clear from recent incident reports that this information has increased recognition, and that recognition and subsequent first aid measures have likely had a positive impact. The other fairly recent example is the introduction of the gas density tables following a series of papers and research by experts in the field resulting in the production of a set of tables. This led to the recommendation that the density of the breathing gas should not be greater than 6.3 g · l−1; the ideal density is less than 5.2 g. l-1.
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