 |
| Photo: ACMG Arete Newsletter cover, V60 Winter 24 |
Two developments going in opposite directions with regards to gathering incident reports into central databases:
Bigger news and closer to home, and the exemplar for going backwards, the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides (ACMG) announced that it is scrapping its Incident Reporting and Learning System (IRLS). It was designed as a means of capturing and sharing incident, injury and near miss events among certified mountain guides to improve the safety of the sector. In 2023 one particularly serious event was reported by the guide involved into the database. While it was not released for wider reading, it was still open to 'discovery' in the lawsuit that followed and is being used against the guide and ACMG. ACMG's insurer shut the reporting system down for fear of future lawsuits. You can read the full account from the ACMG on pg. 48 at this link.
In the other direction, the U.K. is in the process of implementing a national incident database for outdoor programs. They appear to be taking it slowly, with a multi phase roll out including trial research and extensive testing. The preliminary results of their work can be found at this link, with some good insight into the needs in creating a platform that must by definition cover a whole country's worth of outdoor activities.
From a larger perspective, there is more momentum towards capturing and sharing - the ACMG is newsworthy for its backwards direction. Australia has proven with their UPLOADS that the collective data can be very valuable in decision making and justifying outdoor activities to parents or schoolboards, for example, even for those who don't necessarily contribute to it. The ACMG proves the system implemented requires some very basic structure and training to use. I would argue (admittedly having not seen the offending incident report) that user error is likely the bigger issue in this particular case, putting on paper potentially incriminating details.
I am a fan of collecting data, and cautiously support its public aggregation, but contextual variables are so important in interpreting even a very simple injury report. Risk tolerance of the organization, the intention of the program itself, youth vs. adult populations - all this affects what gets reported. I published an article on this a while back, pondering what to do with incident data and limitations when comparing one data set to another. Read it here.
What all this points to is a tension between capturing learning with the intention of preventing future events, against the legal perspective to cover for past events. While true that 'everything that you write down can be used against you', that just implies certain care is needed in building report form templates and training for guides on what does and does not get written into them. All in all, ACMG loses out here, the UK gains.