Safety Guide for Leaders
The club as a published safety policy that all club trips should go through. Club trips are those that are paid for through the club. The purpose of the safety policy is to ensure that all club leaders exercise due diligence in organising trips and to ensure that all members of a trip are informed of the trip plan and risk mitigation.
Trips Committee
Before you advertise your trip to the club you should first email the trips committee – safety@outc.org.nz
These are people who have probably been where you are intending to go and they will have heaps of useful advice, they will also let you know what they think is an acceptable number of people to take on the trip. This is a hard limit, if you have a problem with it you can appeal to the Prez who will make a final decision. In the vast majority of cases this will not be an issue. Experience has shown that trips get into difficulty when there are too many people to be safely managed, regardless of the leaders ability.
Once the trips committee has provided you with a group size you can plan the trip and start advertising it, you are the leader so you get to choose who comes along, you are responsible for ensuring that people coming along have the right level of experience, this is usually not a problem if you get the advertising right! Saying ‘no’ to people is an important skill to learn, it’ll save you a lot of hassle.
Overdue Trips
When you sign people up to your trip you need to get their contact details on the ‘pink form’, these are left with a contact person while you are away, make sure you let them know when you are out safely and when you are home safely. If you are overdue they should get the pink forms and call all the contact people (flatmates and the like) letting them know you are late out, and when the police will be called. This is to prevent flatmates from reporting people missing if thy don’t come back from a trip on Sunday night, usually we would wait till monday morning to raise the alarm, to give a delayed party time to get out.
