Enhancing Water Safety – A NSW Safe Communities Project

The lifeguards in Kiama have been visiting the local primary schools for several years coming up to the long summer holidays with surf safety messages.

Safe Communities Model

Safe Communities is a program that was initiated by the World Health Organisation. The Safe Communities model creates an infrastructure in local communities for addressing injury prevention initiatives through the building of local partnerships. Communities build relationships to target injury-related issues that are of significance in their local area and then organise solutions to address these issues.

Kiama Safe Community

The Kiama Local Government area is situated 2 hours south of Sydney. Kiama covers an area of 256 sq km and is home to 17,970 residents. With its beautiful beaches, quaint rural character and relaxed atmosphere, Kiama is a popular holiday destination for both international tourists and Sydneysiders.

Outline of problem

There were two aspects to the problem of promoting water safety, one was local knowledge of surf safety, and the other visitor safety, as the population of Kiama rises very dramatically in the key holiday season. Both sets of users of the surf enjoy it in a variety of ways, for fishing, swimming, boarding and boating. There is an active surf club, which has a "nippers" program for local children, which clearly enhances their knowledge and safe water conduct. However, not all children have parents who encourage attendance at this!

Project description

The lifeguards in Kiama have been visiting the local primary schools for several years coming up to the long summer holidays with surf safety messages. However, they gave identical messages to all ages, and with identical modes of delivery.

Here is where Safe Communities came in! Firstly we developed an age appropriate lesson plan for the different stages of primary school, and trialed it with young volunteers. The contents reflected the different and developing activities that the children were likely to be involved in when living in Kiama. Information sessions with the lifeguards who would deliver the water safety messages were then held. The program was delivered into all the local primary schools, along with two levels of competition for the children, one a drawing competition for the younger age ranges, and a poetry writing competition, obviously on water safety, for the older children. The local surf shop sponsored the prizes. We also produced a fridge magnet, large and clear drawings as well as easy to read text, for all the children to take home to serve as a reminder.

To contact the visitors to Kiama, we placed fridge magnets throughout the holiday camps, in cabins and on site vans, and supported this with large posters giving surf safety information, and the times of beach patrols, details of the leisure centre, and other alternative suggestions if the weather was not good. We backed this up, using the local lifesavers, with short presentations in the holiday parks on key Saturdays in the holiday season, aimed at children, and emphasising the key surf safety messages. This gave good exposure to the role of the lifeguard and lifesavers.

Project outcomes

All aspects of this project were very well received, and the number of incidents on patrolled beaches was significantly down on previous years (awaiting figures at the end of the season) . We hope to run a similar program next year, as we want our beaches and beautiful ocean to be enjoyed safely by all!

Kiama Water Safety

For further information

Contact	:	Patricia Knight
Phone	:	+61 2 4232 0557
Email	:	patriciak@kiama.nsw.gov.au

WWW

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http://www.kiama.nsw.gov.au/