Leisure Safety Department
Campaigns and Key Issues
To support our key issues in the leisure safety area, we have achieved the following through campaigning:
- Following the DfT review into water safety, we re engineered to RoSPA water safety committee to become the National Water Safety Forum, which has a much more encompassing membership and affords greater interdepartmental working within government on issues of water safety.
- Worked with Holiday Which? to highlight issues surrounding informal beach hire and watersports operation abroad.
- Led the UK participation in the EU wide ‘Be Water Wise’ campaign.
- Undertook specific research into childhood drowning, and looked in detail at the operation of swimming pools abroad.
- Supported the ASA ‘Get safe for summer’ swimming camps.
- Continued to fund and collect data on drowning and near drowning episodes, to further understand and combat this problem.
- Ran a public awareness campaign to highlight the risks of back garden ponds to small children.
- Promoted the concept in the media and among professionals of ‘As safe a necessary, not as safe as possible’ for the leisure sector.
- Worked with key partners such as British Waterways, The Royal National Lifeboat Institute, The Royal Lifesaving Society, Environment Agency, Maritime and Coastguard Agency, ABP to highlight the risks of water to visitors and children in particular in a sensible and proportionate way.
- Funded and provided public safety information in a sensible and balanced way. In particular our ‘RUA Dummy 2?’ and ‘Don't Go In’ campaigns have been very successful in reaching key audiences.
Water Safety Education
RoSPA for several years now has called for improvements in the teaching of swimming and water safety, improvements in access afforded by good facilities and teachers to enable this to occur, and a step change in the ambition shown by Government in this key area. See our briefing note on this and explore some of the campaigns we have been involved with over recent years.
Be Water Wise is a campaign run by EuroSafe, the European Association for Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion. Based on the premise that drowning is the second leading cause of death for children in Europe, it provides a number of resources, newly updated in 2007 providing advice and information on child water safety. The key Be Water Wise campaign messages are:
- Actively supervise all young children
- Teach your children how to swim
- Everyone must wear a personal floatation device (lifejacket) when boating or fishing
- Get trained in CPR
- Use pools that are fenced with locking gates
- Teach children never to swim alone
Get Safe for Summer is a campaign undertaken by the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA) to raise awareness for the summer months that swimming in natural outdoor environments such as the sea, rivers, lakes and canals is quite different from swimming in an indoor swimming pool. It focuses on the importance of learning to swim and of water safety skills.
Focusing on water safety and risk perception of young people this campaign run by ROSPA in partnership with the Environment Agency is supported by a free teaching resource downloadable on the internet. The premise of the campaign is to help equip young people with the ability to make an informed decision about the risks they take in and around water.
Government Garden Pond Safety Campaign
RoSPA acted in partnership with the Department of Trade to raise awareness of the danger of garden ponds. To do this we helped with research and distributed garden safety leaflets and pond safety flyers through garden centres, DIY stores and GP’s surgeries nationwide, in addition raising the profile of the issue throughout the UK.
If you are interested in a particular campaign, or think that that RoSPA should be involved or help with your campaign then please contact us!
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RoSPA is a registered charity: Registered Charity No: 207823 Patron: Her Majesty the Queen RoSPA Head Office: Edgbaston Park, 353 Bristol Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham B5 7ST, UK |
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