​The more time you spend out on camps, excursions, activities and sports, the more likely you are to be using your first aid skills. Having worked in the industry now for 20 years, there’s been many times I’ve needed to treat students (and teachers) for a range of injuries and illnesses. Despite the sheer number over the years, the number one treatment question I had to ask myself was, “Can I give this student a Panadol?”
 
It’s a simple question, which unfortunately can take a long time to answer. I’ve rifled through countless medical forms, often found nothing and had to make a lot of unnecessary phone calls to parents to get a simple answer.
 
Unfortunately, you can’t just turn a blind eye or give a student pain-relief without permission. This puts you in a compromising position and with the increasing number of parents who have read far too many books on ‘the dangers of everything,’ their faith in bottled water to cure all, might lead to your facing major problems and angry calls, if you give their child simple pain medication. On the other hand, what if they have an actual allergy to pain medications? In my experience, even if a child is conscious, which is usually the case, and can tell you what they can and can’t have, this is still not the most reliable way to see if you are permitted to give them pain-relief, as they might be happy with it, but what if their parents are not?
 
Rather than having teachers take this risk for one of the most commonly asked treatment questions they will ever have, we built a simple yet effective new feature in the Xcursion app which tells teachers, coaches and instructors at a glance what parents have given permission for their child to have as well as what could be potentially harmful. This not only saves time and improves treatment, but covers teachers, coaches and instructors in their application of their duty of care and can save everyone from the massive headache which comes with potentially angry parents. I only wish I’d had this ten years ago when I was running trips each and every week and I was constantly fishing around for really simple information that was buried in a whole load of pointless stuff. I know this is a fairly obvious statement too, but at the end of the day, despite your duty of care over your students, you still can’t give them any sort of medication unless you have express permission to do so.

​​COVID-19 is a significant global pandemic issue and has been running since the end of 2019, when it was first discovered in Wuhan, in China. Now, this has ravaged the world and there are some serious considerations to be made when planning any sort of school excursion or activity around the impact that this may have on one of your programs.
 
The way in which you should be treating COVID-19 is the same way that you should be treating any other highly infectious disease for either your campus or school activity. So it shouldn't be done in isolation as a separate issue. It should be done in conjunction with your other risk management considerations and concerns. What's really important, though, is that the focus on COVID-19 shouldn't detract from the other risk management principles and practices you have in place to manage risk for whatever the excursion or activity is. If the management of COVID-19 were to compromise the management of risk in another area, then it's critically important that you review the appropriateness of doing that activity at this point in time.

The safety of one activity shouldn't be compromised by the implications of another. And for an example of this, I can imagine doing a belayed climb. You may have an instructor who is up close to one of the students or several students where they have to check harnesses, and then you're belaying on a rope. Now, this can be done safely and you can apply control measures such as face masks and also social distancing. However, where that social distancing is not possible, then maybe it's worth reconsidering the activity itself until later down the track. But critically important, just as a reminder, don't compromise any of the other safety of your activities for the management of COVID-19. Now that's not to say don't manage COVID-19. I think I really need to make a clear distinction there. But if the risks are too great for that activity, as a result of having to manage another contingency and another hazard, then discontinue that activity at this point in time.

I think that's really the most important outtake from this. It is really important to expect that all of your instructors are up to speed with what the virus is, how it is transmitted, and control measures. It's really important to provide this information to the school administrators, the teachers involved, the parents, and the students. And clear communication is critically important. Just because it's been on the news every single day for the last 8 months or 12 months, or however long it's been, it's really important that you still go through the causation and the control measures, and be very clear with staff about this. It's really important that prevention is absolutely critical to the safe running of your programs.
 
As an indication of some of the different levels of risks you may encounter and how to manage them, we'll just run through some of the high and medium level risks where you may need to look at other personal protective equipment and other controls to be in place for this kind of activity. For example, an instructor providing first aid to a student, generally, you would have your standard and absolutely, you would have your standard of gloves on to handle any patients. But in addition to that, you should also look at having face masks on both parties and ensuring that if you can't maintain that social distancing of around six feet, then you must have those personal protective equipment and devices in place to prevent that or reduce the risk of that transmission. So that's one of the high-risk activities is applying first aid. Also, if you have teachers or teaching assistant who are working with higher-need students. Say if you have students with disabilities or any other provisions where they need a carer and the carer may be in close contact, again, this is where that personal protective equipment is critically important as these would be considered a high-risk activity in the scheme of things in the current environment.

In terms of some of your medium risk activities, all of those instructors and students and staff on any of the trips should be considered a medium risk. So as this medium risk may involve handling cutlery, handling dishes, also being on vehicles or in vehicles together, then you really need to consider the cleaning regimes and the monitoring of this as a critically important part. What we've done is we've put together a document which steps you through these different contingency plans to help guide your approach, to getting school excursions back out and running again.

This online guide is to be used in conjunction with the latest recommendations from the CDC, as well as the recommendations from your school administration, their legal counsel, and their insurers. So please ensure that you cover all of these different bases because the most important thing is to safely get our students back out and doing the sorts of school excursions and activities and camps, which they love, and they learn so much from. So it's really important as an additional consideration to your risk assessments at this point in time, and certainly for the foreseeable future, to be really focusing on how you are going to effectively prevent the virus coming onto your program. And if so, if a case does occur on the program or a suspected case, how are you going to quickly isolate that student or that staff member or that instructor, and then make contact with authorities to let them know so that contact tracing can start to prevent the wider spread of the disease.

​What is your school’s risk management plan? Do you have one? Does everyone know about it? Do you really know what’s expected of you in regards to your school’s risk management? Is it just about the documents or does it go deeper than that? What’s your school’s appetite for risk? Do you even know what that means? Is the school’s risk management backed up by any sort of budget?
 
These are some really important questions you should be asking your school administration. With the global pandemic having highlighted some serious challenges for schools and the world, the idea of risk management can feel overwhelming. However, it doesn’t have to be because much of the angst and frustration comes from confusing and contradictory information. Having a solid foundation and understanding of risk management can help reduce some of these concerns now.  It is massively beneficial over the long-term for student safety and wellbeing.
 
Unless we have an idea of what’s expected and or the systems in place for risk management at school, it’s hard to know where to start. Most schools have a risk form, which is often completed by teachers with no real understanding about risk management. This is not their fault but is problematic and an issue which needs to be addressed right across the school to ensure good risk management can be developed and applied consistently throughout the school.
 
To achieve this, staff need training and annual refresher courses, or extension courses in risk management. The expectations of risk management need to be clear and able to be implemented by every department, regardless of the subject. This will help reduce injuries, incidents and make every activity which is being run safer and more enjoyable for students. Risk management should not be just made up as the program goes, nor should it be just a piece of paper which someone has to fill in. Good risk management occurs weeks, months and years before a school excursion or activity even begins, but so many schools don’t provide training for their staff, which results in bad outcomes for the school and their students.
 
From years of working in the industry, we’ve seen the same things over and over again and the amount of money and prestige at a school has no bearing on its ability to manage risk. It’s only through good quality training and development that this is possible. Importantly, schools need to allocate money for good quality training, equipment and reviews for all the programs they run which involve a level of risk. Through doing so, this will help build a culture of risk management that results in great educational programs and outcomes for students.