The team, Cognitas, has focused on the work of the British Sub-Aqua Club and its annual Diving Incidents Report.
Cognitas suspects that, in many cases, divers who suffer incidents do not report them.
Possible reasons range from “apathy to fear of reprisals (commercial, personal or within a club) or that nothing will change, so ‘why bother?’”.
Too little data, it thinks, comes from divers directly, once contributions from the likes of recompression chambers, the Coastguard and the RNLI are taken into account.
It has been running an online questionnaire in order to establish why this is so. Divers are invited to contribute to this up to 29 July.
Cognitas will report on its findings by the end of August.
It plans then to design an “open reporting system” through which divers can report incidents in a “confidential manner”.
“Civil and military aviation communities already have such practices in place, and safety records have improved as a consequence,” it says.
Cognitas intends to design a system which will make it “easier to submit reports and access incident report data”, and which would give “more details” about incidents.
The research team consists of Gareth Lock, Ted Crosbie and Gareth Burrows, the first two having military backgrounds.
To find out more about them and the aims of Cognitas, go to www.cognitas.org.uk
Related links
Incidents report published
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