Safety Assessment Industry Summary
Safety Assessment Summary
Risk Management is essential for the safe, successful and continued operation of aquatic facilities. The Aquatic Facility Safety Assessment (AFSA) is a process designed to assist facility managers in improving safety by auditing an aquatic facility against the best practice standards set out in the Guidelines for Safe Pool Operation (GSPO). This independent and detailed assessment reviews key aspects of operation including facility design, administration, technical operation, first aid, programming and supervision.
The Victorian AFSA: State of Industry Report provides an overview of the state of aquatic facilities based on these assessments for a given financial year. It identifies common areas of strength and weakness and can be used to compare mean 'item' and 'sectional' scores with previous years. Furthermore, it provides the management and staff of assessed facilities with the opportunity to calculate and benchark their performance against the rest of the industry.
2011/12 Key Findings
The data used for the 2011/12 report was obtained from the 70 AFSA's completed during this period. Unfortunately despite improvements in recent years, the 2011/12 report identifies static or declining standards across the key aspects of facility operation. This may be a natural plateau, with mean scores in various areas now consistently in and around the 80-90% range. It may also be attributed to the number of facilities that undertook their first AFSA in this period. Whilst the lack of improvement itself may not necessarily be a concern, the decreases noted within certain sections should be. For example, mean Compliance scores in the Administration and Technical Operations sections both declined by 5% when compared to the 2009/10 scores. The biggest concern however, remains the fact that less than one quarter of the public pools in the State went through this independent assessment process, which is endorsed and strongly recommended by the Royal Life Saving Society, the Coroners Prevention Unit and Life Saving Victoria.
The data collected since the introduction of the current tool will continue to be analysed in depth to produce the Industry Summaries. It is planned that this process will be completed every two years.
- 2007/2008 (Financial Year)
- 2009/2010 (Financial Year)
- 2011/2012 (Financial Year)
Please follow the links below to download copies of the respective reports.
2007-2008 AFSA Industry Report (4.49MB)