Welcome to The Dive Locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest in diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management and dive business, I’m your host Tec Clark and thank you so much for being a part of episode number two.

It’s great to have you here folks. At the time of this recording, it is Labor Day weekend of 2019 and we have hurricane Dorian baring down on The Bahamas right now as we speak. This is a massive category five hurricane and we don’t know the damage yet of what this, this storm is causing, but we know it’s bad and so we just lift up all of our thoughts and prayers to everybody in The Bahamas and especially our diving industry colleagues. Boy, the diving industry could be absolutely hit hard from a storm of this category, the reefs, the dive centers, the dive boats, the resorts, the infrastructure to get in and out. So our dive center operations down there, I have a feeling are going to need our support. A couple of our diving industry notables down there that you may know, Stuart Cove, who was actually on the League of Extraordinary Divers podcast, episode six, and also Cristina Zenato, from the League of Extraordinary Divers podcast, episode 19.

They’re both being impacted by this. And so with that, we really, really need to understand what they’re going through and what needs they might have when the storm leaves. Our good friends, Cathryn Castle Garcia and Captain Gui Garcia with C2G2 Productions have already launched a GoFundMe campaign for Cristina Zenato. Now they did a video segment with her, they’re very close and so they felt the need to reach out right now, even while this hurricane is bearing down and come up with a GoFundMe account for Cristina Zenato Grand Bahama and I will put the link to that GoFundMe in the Show notes page for this episode. I have a feeling that there is going to need some disaster relief for our dive businesses down there. So we’ll keep you updated on how this goes. Our next episodes we’ll hear what the outcomes of the storms are from The Bahamas. So again, everybody please keep The Bahamas in your thoughts and prayers.

In-Service Training

Okay everyone. So today in episode two of the dive locker, we’re going to go over a risk management strategy that is absolutely overlooked in the diving industry and one that can completely change the dynamics of your emergency action plans. It’s called in-service training. The second thing we’re gonna go over today is the jacket drill. If you want good clear communication teaching for your divemaster and instructor candidates, people that are going through training to become a dive professional, they need to have a great clear communications, right? The jacket drill is part of that. And I’ll share that with you too today. And also today we’re going to hit some of the industry’s latest news for you. So here we go. Let’s dive in.

Let’s take a look at in-service training; what is it and how can it be effective for you as a dive professional? Well, in-service training is basically a term that you see and hear used a lot within health and safety professions such as lifeguarding, law enforcement, EMS (emergency medical services). And what it is is it’s to keep those perishable skills, those hands on health and safety skills fresh. Now the other unique thing about it is that it’s not done in classrooms. So we don’t just sit and do our normal CPR on a mannequin and a classroom in a sterile environment like we’ve learned before. In-service training is meant to be in service during your normal operations. And so for that, an in-service training will take place in the field. That means in our situation, in the diving industry, that we would take our emergency training and we would bring it into the environment.

So instead of pushing on a CPR mannequin in a classroom with a little pad under your knees and things like that, in air condition, nope, we’re going to go on the boat. We’re going to be in rocking and rolling seas. You’re going to have your wetsuit on. You’re going to be pouring with a wetness from the water coming out of your wetsuit and sweat or whatever the case is. And trying to do your CPR on a moving boat with chaos and everything that goes with that, that is more accurate and realistic. And so what we see within service training is that it’s done mostly for the workers, mostly for people to get and keep their skills going at the workplace. Now you can also have people coming in outside of the workplace to help with this in-service training in areas like being bystanders or being multiple victims or being a spouse or a loved one of a victim or patient.

And that person is a little chaotic, you know? So you can make all kinds of scenarios. But the biggest thing about in service training is that it is all about realism. So we want in-service training to be as realistic as absolutely possible. So how do we make this as realistic as possible? We’ll think about this in an actual emergency. What would you have at your disposal to use? Where would the things be, et cetera? So we want everything to be as natural and normal as possible for our preparation. And then we want the scenarios to dictate the rest. So here’s a few things that can make realism happen in your in-service trainings. First of all, cell phones. You can use a cell phone to be pre-programmed into a number that is used for another person that is on the other end of that cell phone.

That could be a 911 operator or an EMS operator. So this operator then plays the role using a script to then ask the appropriate questions. This is a great way to do this because what happens is, is that an individual winds up realizing that they have to walk around with a phone attached to their head while they are transporting an O2 unit or setting up a O2 unit or an AED or whatnot. And all of a sudden it becomes very realistic. How many times have you seen a Rescue class or a simulated emergency, somebody that puts their hand up to their head, makes that little a symbol with the fingers, like they’re on a phone and then they say, “oh yeah, I just called EMS”. No, it doesn’t work that way. We want an individual to see what it’s like to try to carry things or do things with their hands or write stuff down or whatever it is with a cell phone attached to their head. That’s where it gets real.

Now what we also can do is use dummy cell phones. My favorite is once a cell phone got put into the laundry and it got totally damaged. So I used that as a prop cell phone. And in that case, that’s great for if you’re wet and you’re out on the boat or whatnot, you’re not worried about an actual cell phone getting ruined because of all the wet coming off of your body or, or a wetsuit or whatnot. So in that case, we put the 911 operator next to the person making the call, and that 911 operator just has a script on a clipboard and goes through it and follows the person around that has the phone, to their ear. So that’s one way to make it be realistic. Another thing is bystanders.

So if you can have individuals that are part of the scenario, part of the scene, they could be other divers, they could be people on the dive boat, they could be people on the shore, they could be people on the side of the pool or other swimmers at the pool. But what happens is, is that these bystanders become part of the process. So if the lifeguards start pulling people out of the pool, now they can come in and add to the drama of the scenario. This can happen on the boat, this can happen on the lake, wherever as well, right? You can have other divers come up and those other divers are part of a class or they are the buddy of a diver and they can be varying in their level of drama. Is it a spouse, a loved one? Is it a fraternity or sorority brother or sister, best friend, right?

The list goes on and on and you can make all kinds of things up. And we even have scenarios where we’ll have individuals come along and say, “hi, I’m a nurse. Can I help?” And see if your staff actually uses those people. And so bystanders are a good little curve ball to throw in. And then victims. So you need to have people, we don’t want to do everything with mannequins. So using victims and having them be as dead weight limp as possible because that is very different than people that are rigid. So adding that true limp, dead weight to it really helps make it more realistic. Now move them to the point of an exit point or whatever. But yeah, don’t actually start doing the process of CPR on an actual person. Even simulating that doesn’t do well. Swap out that person for a mannequin at that point so that you can do all of the true compressions and make it work at that point.

One of the things that I absolutely love is old wetsuits. So we bring in old wetsuits into our in-service training to make it more realistic. What we do with the wetsuits is we put them on the CPR mannequin. That way when it is time to put the AED pads on, they’ve got to cut away the wetsuit. So we teach the process of how to cut away a wetsuit and we use it with old damaged wetsuits that that have come in and we just hang on to them for this specific purpose. And that way you understand the importance of having sheers along with the AED. 

And training units. You want to have units that can be used for this. Now I am a big, big proponent of having actual oxygen flowing. I am not one that puts air in the oxygen units for these kinds of uh, scenarios and training. No. People need to be comfortable with the actual gas and have a true respect for the actual gas that’s being used. They will handle it differently if it is not actual oxygen, so we keep training units on hand that are real, they’re live, they’re totally functional, but if they get wet sandy and slightly banged up, then it’s not such an issue.

And then also we have the timing of this. Now here is what I love. Once you start getting into that role of CPR and so forth, it goes on kind of a cruise control right? Until EMS arrives in a real scenario. Well think about this. What you can do is you can look at what your county or city has for an average EMS response time. Now here in Broward County, it’s between 8 and 12 minutes. Now what we do is as soon as the call for help, the phone call has been completed to 911 in our scenarios, then we will do an 8 to 10 minute or 12 minute buffer to wait till we actually cancel the training we are, or end scenario. We want them to feel what it would be like to truly wait. Now let’s say you’re on the dive boat and you’ve got to wait for the coast guard or whatever, those kinds of services, it could be much longer. So to cycle through your staff and have them swap out roles and continuously circulate to wait until quote unquote EMS arrives. That’s really awesome. You can also add your public safety, your EMS, you can add realistic arrivals of those people too so that they know where to go and how to access people and so forth. So this is key is having this realism in place for in-service trainings.

Now here’s what’s going to happen. You need to structure this in a few ways. First you have to have yourselves evaluators, one or two or more that are the top dog professionals in this area of health and safety training at your dive center. And they are the ones that are evaluating, and they are the ones kind of calling the shots. They tell the bystandards when and what to do early on. They’re the ones calling out that the victim has no pulse or is not breathing, et Cetera. 

Then you’ve got the opportunity to write down all of the things that you’re observing. What could have been done better, what are the wrong things, what are the good things and put all that together because that goes into a debriefing. The debriefing is a critical element of all in-service training. It brings together a person’s own self reflection of what they’ve learned during this time and what they think they did right, what they think they did wrong, and then the evaluators come in and also comment on what they did right and what they did wrong.

The debriefing is huge in this. Now, here’s the big, big piece evaluators. The debriefing cannot be about all the negative and “you did that so bad that this person is going to die”, et cetera. Although that might be a fact. You may be able to mention something to that effect, but in-service trainings are supposed to be an environment that if people get it wrong, okay, guess what? You’ve learned a lesson and you’re going to go have pizza and beer after your in-service training because it wasn’t real. The deal is is that if those same mistakes happened in the real world, in the real scenario, people aren’t going for beer and pizza afterwards. In fact, it’s a very, very dark side that takes place. So what we’re looking at here is an ability to let people make mistakes. If this is their time to learn, this is their time to learn. Don’t be too overly critical about mistakes. They are part of a learning process. So embrace it and endeavor to do better.

Now, here’s the secret sauce of doing better. You ready for this? You have to do your scenarios twice. I’ll say it again. You have to do your scenarios twice. So whatever scenario you did with whatever team you did, they have to do it a second time. The reason being is is that you need to convince that learning has taken place. It’s all about readiness. So remember when we have a true diving incident, the majority of the time that things go wrong is that people are taken off guard. They’re taken by surprise. They didn’t know where to exit the water. They didn’t know how to get the victim to a spot where EMS would pick them up, whatever. They weren’t prepared for the phone call, whatever the case is, this will flesh that all out.

And when you do it a second time, then there is no surprises that come from the second time. They gain their confidence, they watch the time. And by the way, I always time things like how long it takes somebody to get a victim out of the water and then onto oxygen or CPR or the first breaths put in them, whatever it is you’re measuring. Keep a running list on a clock, a time clock so that you can say, hey look, in scenario number one, you started CPR three minutes after removing the victim from the water. In scenario number two, you started CPR one minute and 20 seconds after removing the victim from the water. And that makes people feel good because they got efficiencies and effectiveness. So that is a huge thing. Folks, do it twice. And we round-robin our staff, so we have team A, team B, Team C, team D and we have them all rotating through their different roles as bystanders, as victims, and as the dive team that would be the workers in the scenario doing their emergency work.

And so when we rotate them all through, they all get the opportunity to do it. So yeah. Is this going to take time away from your other operations at your dive center? Is this going to cost money to have all your employees on the clock? Yes, but it is absolutely well, well worth it. Here’s the reason why. You all think you have emergency action plans, EAPs all set locked down and nailed. But guess what? Once you literally do these things, you realize the flaws and I’m guaranteeing you there will be many. The other thing is what about working with others? You see if you’re on that dive boat, have you done emergency training with the crew? Now I’m not talking that you took your rescue diver course out on a dive boat and you did some rescue diving and they kind of played along. I’m talking truly interacting with the crew on the boat, making it a dialogue with the captain and the captain saying, “yes, I have just called US Coast Guard” and that kind of stuff.

You can do it at your pools, you can do it at your lakes, quarries, any place that you’re diving. You know, one of my favorite stories on this is with a YMCA. We had an individual come in and propose to a YMCA that they could do scuba training at the y and the y said, “okay”. And so they did scuba training and what happened was I challenged them that have they ever worked with the lifeguards to do scenarios to do actual rescues in case they needed it for their classes. They said they hadn’t. So they embarked on this process and it was a completely eye opening experience because the emergency action plans that the lifeguards had in place were ridiculously off from the emergency action plan of the dive crew. The two stumbled all over everything. They couldn’t figure out the oxygen units, they couldn’t work together on the removal of the victims from the water. We do it one way, they do it with backboards on and on and on, and where is EMS to come? And Oh my goodness, it was an absolute amazing amount of learning that took place and they were so grateful that they did it. And guess what? One month later they needed to use the emergency services because a diver had an injury that required an EMS response. And because of that, it went smoothly. If it didn’t, it would have been absolutely disastrous for everyone involved.

So there you go, my friends. That’s in-service training in a nutshell. Now, if you want to see more about this and learn more about this, I have an article that I wrote for Alert Diver magazine. It is at Alert Diver Online. You can go to www.alertdiver.com/emergencysimulations. The name of the article is Emergency Simulations for Dive Professionals and it goes into detail more detail about what I’ve just said here.

So look that up. I will put this link in the Show notes page so you can easily access it and uh, and get to it. So there you go. That is in-service training in a nutshell. If you have any tips, suggestions, techniques that you want to share about in service training, you can go to our website and you can click on the link on the microphone and talk about any tips that you have for in-service training. I know tons of you are doing some cool things and by the way, can you bring this into your rescue classes? You bet you can. A lot of these things work for rescue diver courses as well.

The Jacket Drill

So we all know that communication is one of the key skills that one needs to have to be a dive professional. And we start training that at the divemaster level, right? And then Assistant Instructor and Instructor. We don’t stop training for communication. Communication is key for doing dive briefings, for commanding dive situations like rescues, for teaching in the classroom. All of these different areas that we use. Clear communication skills are super important. But what are we doing to actually enhance it? A lot of times we hand them the slates and say “here, go for it”. And we give them critiques and all. But there’s another way that you can bring some cool training into your classroom for clear communications. It’s called the Jacket Drill and it’s one of my favorite drills to do for extra good, clear communication training. And here’s what it is.

You get two people, one has a jacket, get the jacket, it can be any kind of jacket, a cool scuba patch jacket, which would be awesome. I think those need to come back, by the way. I know they’re so tacky and if you disagree with that, but I don’t know, I think they need to come back. They’re pretty cool. So, uh, anyhow, I digress. The jacket. So what you want to do is have two people and one jacket and you look at the jacket. Both people look at it and give it a little study and understand it. But then they go back to back. Now the trainer can take the jacket and the trainer can do what they want with it. They could button it up, they could unbutton it, they could button one button, they could pull one sleeve out, they could turn it inside out, they could do whatever they want to the jacket.

And then the two people, one is the instructor and one is the student. The trainer hands the jacket to the student. Now the student can’t speak, the student is silent the whole time and the instructor must blindly, well his or her back is to, the student must try to get the jacket on to the student and buttoned up and perfectly ready to go. So as it starts, the student is holding the jacket and the instructor starts giving clear communications hopefully of what to do, how to hold the jacket, where to hold the jacket, what to do with the jacket, which arm goes where on and on and on. The student is to just listen and do exactly what the instructor says to do. So what winds up happening is the instructor goes through all of these, these instructions to the point where the instructor feels confident that it is on right and it’s all buttoned up, ready to go.

At that point then the instructor can turn around and see how accurate or not those directions were. And so here’s what winds up happening. Usually it’s messed up because when the instructor says, put your right arm through the hole of the sleeve of the right arm, well guess what? There’s two holes. And so the student can put their arm through the bottom hole of the jacket where the hand normally comes out, right? Not inside where the armpit is. And then they’re wearing this jacket completely disheveled  and wrong. It is really cool. And what you want to do is give them the opportunity to do it again. So after everybody does it one time, go back and do it again so that that way they get to try being more clear and that usually Shows success might not be 100% but at a definitely be better than the first time. So that is the jacket drill, my friends. It is awesome for good clear communication training for your dive professionals. Use it next time and hey, if you want put it in a staff meeting, it’s another great thing to do during a staff meetings and that way your whole staff gets better at communications as well. Enjoy

Industry News

In diving industry news, we have the open registration for the DEMA Show. DEMA Show 2019 we’ll be in Orlando, Florida at the Orange County Convention Center November 13th through 16^th. Now if you have not been to a DEMA Show, you have got to go. If you are a dive professional, this is the top trade Show for all of us. Now why is that? Because there’s going to be over 600 booths from anything of equipment manufacturers, travel destinations, apparel service providers, training agencies, you name it, they are there and you are going to be alongside about 10,000 of your industry colleagues, other dive professionals that are going there to learn more about the industry, the latest and greatest and the latest and greatest in new equipment. And then of course all of the agencies and specialty areas in our sport. It’s all there. It’s on showcase on that DEMA Show floor, but then there’s also this whole piece of educational professional development sessions.

We’re talking over 250 different seminars that go on, that talk about everything from industry trends and economic topics and business strategies, technical training, all kinds of training actually. And so you get all of this from the different agencies, manufacturers, exhibitors, and then DEMA themselves also puts on a lot of the education and resources. So it’s just fantastic. This is the world’s only international trade, only event for diving and action watersports and travel pro’s. So you just got to be a part of it. It is absolutely fantastic. I’ll be there, connect with me. Uh, you can connect with me on the DEMA app. There’s even a Show app that helps you navigate, helps you with your scheduling and you know what to see when it’s, it’s awesome. So we can connect on there and I’d love to meet many of you in person. So again, that is open and I’m putting it in here now for industry news because basically you’ve got a month until the Show price goes up for your registration.

So get it in, get it in early. And the other thing that you want to do to register early for this is that there are the room blocks that go along with the DEMA Show at the host hotels. Those usually go quickly because after an entire day, walking that Show floor, it’s awesome to just literally walk across the street and go to the host hotels. So look up that at the DEMAShow.com. So www.DEMAShow.com and look into registering for that.

Okay, so there you have it. Episode two is in the books. Thanks everybody for being a part of this. I hope that you’re getting value from this episode. You’ll see that other episodes will be more business heavy, like the next one we’ve got coming up. And then there’ll be some that are risk management heavy, or teaching heavy. So each episode will be different in its content, but in all of them, hopefully you will pull value and resources that can actually help you grow as a diving professional. So thanks again everybody. It’s great to have you here. We’ll see you in the next episode of the dive locker podcast. Take care and safe diving my friends.

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