Incidents in the Great Outdoors: A systems approach to understanding and preventing led outdoor accidents

Abstract

Adverse incidents during Led Outdoor Activities (LOA) remains an ongoing concern worldwide. This paper provides a systems analysis of adverse incidents in the Australian Led Outdoor Activity (LOA) sector between 2018-2019. Incidents were reported by 18 LOA organisations via the LOA specific Understanding and Preventing Led Outdoor Accident Data System (UPLOADS). UPLOADS is underpinned by Rassmusen’s risk management framework and associated AcciMap method. In total, 2,457 incidents from 357,691 LOA program participation days were reported, with an incident rate of 6.9 incidents per 1000 program participation days. AcciMap analyses of the incidents revealed that there was a total of 5,442 contributory factors with 3,259 relationships between them, from all levels of the LOA system spanning the activity environment to regulatory and government levels. This paper demonstrates that incidents in LOA are systems issues and that prevention of LOA incidents should focus on removing the network of interacting contributory factors.