Changes to safety in recreation water activities Regulation and Code of Practice

Scott

Hello, my name is Scott Firth and I'm the Principal Inspector for the Dive Unit at Workplace Health and Safety Queensland. With me here is Rob Schutte Lead Inspector for the Dive Unit. We have produced this presentation to inform industry of the changes to the Code of Practice and Regulation regarding the provision of recreational water activities in Queensland. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today. I would also like to pay my respects to elders past and present.

Rob

Thanks Scott. I'll start by giving you a quick rundown of the current legislation that applies to businesses providing snorkelling and diving activities in Queensland. We have specific legislation that addresses the provision of Recreational water activities with the Safety and Recreational Water Activities Act 2011 and the Safety and Recreational Water Activities Regulation 2024. The legislation is supported by a Code of Practice which provides a practical guide to achieving the standards of health and safety required under the Act and Regulation. The legislative framework aims to ensure that persons to whom recreational war activities are provided, including recreational diving and snorkelling, are given the highest level of protection from hazards and risks arising from the activity so far as is reasonably practicable. The Act poses duties to ensure the health and safety of persons to whom recreational war activities are provided by a person conducting a business or undertaking.

The Act is the overarching legislation that imposes health and safety duties, which apply to dive and snorkel operators, workers, and others at the workplace. It details requirements including incident notification notices and legal proceedings. The Safety and Recreational Water Activities Act 2011 remains in force and has not changed The Recreational Diving, Recreational Technical Diving and Snorkelling Code of Practice 2024 provides guidance for dive operators on how to meet the requirements of the Act and Regulation for Recreational Diving and Recreational Snorkelling Activities. Whilst the Code of Practice is not law, they are admissible in court proceedings. If you are not doing what is outlined in the Code, then you should be doing something that provides an equivalent or higher standard of health and safety in order to comply with the Act and Regulation. Regulations expire every 10 years, and the Office of Industrial Relations has undertaken a review of the Regulation to ensure it stays up to date. This includes a restructure to reduce duplication, update terminology, and minor technical changes to some sections of the Regulation. The Code of Practice has been updated to reflect the changes made to the Regulation and include some additional changes based on coronial recommendations to improve safety in the industry.

Scott

Both the Regulation and the Code of Practice are available on the WorkSafe website, and I would encourage all operators and workers in the industry to download and familiarise themselves with the content in the Code. There is also a communications kit and table of changes available on the WorkSafe website for ease of reference forms such as the compliance checklist and medical declarations have also been updated and are available on the website. As of the 1st of August, 2024. The Regulation and Code is in effect and all dive and snorkel. Operators will need to be in compliance with the new Code and Regulation. Ignorance of the law is not a defense. If you breach the legislation, you may need to adjust some of your operational practices to ensure that you are compliant with the new rules. We are going to run through what those changes are in this presentation. If you have further questions regarding these changes, then I urge you to contact the Workplace Health and Safety Dive Unit to clarify any questions.

We'll have some contact details up at the end of this presentation. Firstly, I'm going run through the changes that have been made to the Regulation. The Regulation has been restructured to avoid duplication between activities where previously the Regulation was separated into a diving and snorkelling section. The new Regulation has been written so that sections that apply to all activities are described together with the specific requirements for snorkelling and diving being addressed. Within each section, a number of terms have been updated in the Regulation duty holder have previously been used to describe the person conducting the business or undertaking that provides recreational water activities. This has been replaced with dive operator, which is defined as a person who conducts a business or undertaking that provides any of the following recreational water activities. A recreational diving, B, recreational technical diving, or C recreational snorkelling. The term resort dive used to refer to the activity of providing introductory diving.

This has been updated to non-certified dive. As most introductory diving does not involve a resort facility. The term was updated to remove any ambiguity. The new Regulation has been updated with some simplified definitions such as recreational diving and certified diving entry level certificate diving has been updated to include that the provision of the course substantially complies with the relevant Australian Standard 2 4 8 0 1 where the Regulation previously referred to AS 4 0 0 5.1 withdrawn standard recreational snorkelling has been clarified to include free diving. First aid has been clarified with a definition that includes CPR oxygen resuscitation and oxygen therapy. We no longer refer to passive and active head counts. The Code of Practice has further information on how counts should be conducted with more operators. Now moving to an electronic form of record keeping, we have updated the definition of a unique identifier to provide some clarification. There has also been further clarification around timeframes for record keeping, making them consistent throughout the Regulation.

Rob

Apart from the administrative changes Scott has just described in the Regulation, there are a couple of changes that may require operators to update their procedures. An amendment has been made to the medical advice for snorkellers, where previously the Regulation required snorkelling participants to advise if they had any concerns about a medical condition. This has been changed directing snorkellers to advise crew if they have any medical conditions. This allows the dive operator to make a proper assessment of risks and addresses an issue that snorkellers may not have been declaring the medical conditions because they were not concerned about it. Dive operators who use a snorkel waiver form to provide the specific medical advice to snorkels will need to adjust their forms to reflect this minor change. Snorkel briefings may also need to be adjusted. The Regulation for counting persons has also been amended to include initiating an emergency plan for a missing person if the counts conducted independently do not agree or match the expected count.

The requirement to have emergency plans comes from the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2011 section 43 and requires all workplaces to have emergency plans. Taking into account the nature of the hazards at the workplace and the type of work being conducted, workplaces are required to have an effective response to any foreseeable emergency. A failed headcount is a foreseeable hazard and is a trigger to initiate the missing person emergency plan. Most of you will already have a procedure in place to manage this emergency, but for those of you who don't, this clarifies that operators who conduct activities from a vessel need to have a plan of what to do in the event of a failed headcount. Operators should check their procedures and emergency plans and ensure that this eventuality is covered. For those operators who provide entry level certificate diving. In other words, open water dive courses, workplace health and safety Queensland have adjusted the requirements around which students are required to get a medical certificate.

We have adopted the Underwater and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS) Recreational Diver Medical Questionnaire as the approved form for entry-level divers. Beginner divers are required to complete this medical self-assessment tool and seek medical clearance for diving. As directed by the questionnaire diver operators are no longer required to seek heightened weight data from open water students to calculate their body mass index. If the UHMS diver medical questionnaire indicates a medical evaluation be completed, the participant needs to provide a medical certificate. This change will simplify the process of conducting entry-level certificate dive courses and aligns Queensland Regulation with internationally accepted medical protocols for diving.

Scott

Thanks, Rob. So now that we have covered the changes being made to the Regulation, we are going to go through the amendments to the Code of Practice. The changes we have just described in the Regulation will be reflected in the Code of Practice as well, so we will not repeat those here. The Code was opened up to review to address concerns raised by a coronial report in 2018 in relation to the death of a non-certified diver. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, any change to the Code was put on hold to allow industry time to recover. Now with the pandemic largely behind us, we've released a new Code to coincide with the release of the new Regulation. There are some changes in the Code that will require an adjustment to how you operate. The new Code has placed a greater emphasis on risk assessments.

Scott

Dive operators should ensure they have a general risk assessment that considers all aspects of the operation, including the risk to passengers from the provision of the activities and the operation of the vessel. Operators should also conduct a risk assessment to determine the number of lookouts and other supervisory personnel that are required. This should take into account the environmental conditions and also the number and abilities of the passengers and crew. The dive operator may allow the activity to be provided with a single lookout based on this assessment so long as they have considered the risk of doing so, including if the lookout needs to conduct a rescue. Following coronial recommendations. The new Code states that operators should record a written risk assessment of the environmental conditions at each dive and snorkel site. This risk assessment should be confirmed by a crew member who enters the water to assess the current and visibility at a site.

Underwater visibility can be difficult to measure, and often two people will have very different estimations of visibility. The operator should implement a system where underwater visibility can be measured such as using a reference point like a mark on a boat or mooring line with a known distance. Another method for measuring visibility is to use a Secchi disc. The information obtained by the environmental dive site risk assessment should inform how you are going to conduct the activity. Where conditions are less than ideal, you may need to increase the level of supervision for divers and snorkellers. This may mean putting on additional lookouts and reducing the group size for divers, dive operators should consider cancelling the activities. If once all control measures have been implemented, there remains a significant risk to participants. If you think that the weather conditions are going to be unfavorable the next day, then you should consider rostering on additional staff to provide a greater level of supervision. Workplace health and safety. Queensland has provided some templates at the back of our code of practice to assist operators with completing these risk assessments. These are in a couple of different formats and operators can also create their own risk assessments to suit their operation.

Rob

The new Code of Practice provides some additional guidance around the provision of non-certified diving, including when it is appropriate to reduce the group ratios and maintain physical contact with students. Dive supervisors who organise introductory divers now called non-certified divers should consider the environmental risk assessment as well as the abilities of the participants and the competency of the instructor when they are determining the group ratio for non-certified divers. Are the participants confident around water? Are they exhibiting anxiety? Have they understood the briefing information clearly? How are they going to cope if there is a bit of surface swell or poor visibility? Is the instructor experienced? Do they know the site well? Are they fatigued? These are all factors that should be considered when determining the ratio for non-certified dives. In the event where there are multiple groups of divers underwater, the instructor and dive supervisor should consider the risk of dive group interaction underwater and plan a route accordingly.

The decision to modify or cancel a dive should not be driven by commercial interests. Dive operators should empower their instructors and supervisors to ensure the safety of all divers. Staff should have the authority to either modify or cancelled dives if the conditions or the abilities of participants indicates that there is a significant risk. Non-certified dive briefings should include information on how to drop their weight belt to achieve positive buoyancy on the surface in an emergency when they are conducting the dive skills. Instructors should ensure that participants can perform the skills confidently prior to commencing the dive and in the event of a panic diver. The Code now directs the instructor to bring the entire group up to ensure that non-certified divers are not left unsupervised underwater. The Code provides some further guidance on the steps to take in the event of a missing diver. Operators should have some way of marking the last known location of a missing diver such as a weighted surface marker buoy. This should be available in the rescue tender so that it can be quickly deployed in the event of a missing diver. Dive Instructors conducting non-certified dives in poor visibility or where the dive route is not well-defined should carry a weighted surface marker boy to mark the position where the diver was last seen. Operators who provide non-certified diving should review their procedures and briefings to ensure they can provide either what is described in the Code or implement something that provides an equal or greater safety factor to participants.

Scott

In addition to the information provided around risk assessments and the provision of non-certified dives, the new Code of Practice includes some guidance on some other subjects. The new Code has included further information regarding the role of the lookout. Dive operators should ensure that the lookout can distinguish between an unconscious snorkeller and a person actively snorkelling. This should form part of the information provided in a lookout induction. Most operators will already have a pulse oximeter as part of their first aid kit. A pulse oximeter can be a very useful diagnostic tool when a person is feeling unwell and can inform first aiders if there is a need to provide oxygen therapy. Pulse oximeters are cheap and easy to use. The new Code advises that they should be included as part of the first aid equipment available to operators. Please remember, oxygen is the primary treatment for decompression sickness.

The Code now includes a section for businesses that provide charters with both the charterer and the charteree having a good understanding of who is responsible for ensuring that equipment and roles are clearly defined in the charter contract. Dive operators need to ensure dive instructors are competent to perform the work whilst an induction process ensures competency for dive instructors starting with a company. The Code now includes advice for operators to implement a system to regularly review the skills of dive workers. The new Code includes guidance on ensuring that equipment such as fins are fitted correctly and suggests remedies if there are issues with fins fitting properly. Following some discussion regarding the treatment of marine stings. The information provided in the code of practice regarding first aid for marine stings has been linked to the Australian Resuscitation Council to ensure there is a consistent approach amongst the marine tourism industry.

Further guidance has been provided in the Code around sharks. It provides information on how to avoid dangerous interactions with these animals and what to do if an aggressive shark is observed in the water. Information regarding immersion pulmonary edema and the risk posed to snorkellers and divers from this condition has been included in the new Code of practice. Finally, a number of appendices that were previously at the end of the Code have been moved online and can now be accessed electronically from the WorkSafe website. This includes the compliance checklist for snorkel only operations and snorkel and dive operations, the medical declaration for non-certified diving and the medical declaration for entry-level certificate diving. I would encourage all operators to download the relevant checklist from the website so they can assess their operations for compliance with the new Regulation and Code of Practice.

Rob

Thanks, Scott. That covers all of the changes that are being implemented under the new Code and Regulation. I have a couple of questions that may come up with the new requirements. When do operators need to be in compliance with the new requirements?

Scott

The new Code of Practice and Regulation come into effect on the 1st of August. You'll need to ensure that you are compliant by this date.

Rob

So, does the risk assessment for the environmental conditions need to be done every day?

Scott:

As the environmental conditions and the abilities and number of passengers changes every day. Operators will need to conduct these assessments on a daily basis. If you operate at different sites, then you'll need to conduct a risk assessment at each site. Operators should monitor the conditions at a site and may need to implement further controls if conditions deteriorate.

Rob:

Where can people go for more information?

Scott:

The new Code of Practice and Regulation are available on our website along with further guidance material. Once operators have familiarised themselves with this information, if they have further questions, they can send us an email at the following address.

Rob

That concludes this presentation. We hope that this information has been of use to everyone. Please get in touch if you have further questions.

Scott

Thanks guys.

Rob

Thanks everyone.