Record Detail Back
The Crux Of Risk Management In Outdoor Programs – Minimising The Possibility Of Death And Disabling Injury
- Share to:
Risk management has become a much- discussed topic in the outdoor education literature in recent years, and a number of approaches to it have been proposed. When I started my career in outdoor education the term risk management had not yet entered the vocabulary. We did, though, talk about safety planning and its prime aim was the protection of program participants from harm. The term ‘risk management’ is now very much part of the jargon in all organisations and the sort of risks that one is expected to consider within an overall risk management plan seem to have considerably increased.
The focus has shifted too. The emphasis in the current standard (Standards Australia and Standards New Zealand, 1999) is very much the protection of organisations themselves from ‘something happening that will have an impact upon objectives’. A recent advertisement for a web-based risk management tool for schools CLASSRooMTM 2001 (DETE, 2001) illustrates this point;