Threshold Concepts for Australian Outdoor Education University Graduates

Inadequate risk assessment has often been implicated as a contributing factor in led outdoor activity incidents. Safety science now largely considers accidents in complex safety critical domains (e.g. led outdoor programs, healthcare, aviation) to be created by a complex web of interacting factors from across the work system. Prior to this program of research, it was unclear as to whether this perspective had been translated into risk assessment practice in led outdoor programs, or indeed risk assessment in other safety critical domains such as aviation, rail, and process control. An overview of the research program will be provided – including the findings that current risk assessment methods and practice are not consistent with systems thinking, existing risk assessment methods are limited in their ability to identify system wide risks, and the newly designed risk assessment method is capable of identifying systemic risks as well as emergent risks. Further, formal reliability and validity testing demonstrated risk assessment may be enhanced by involving multiple analysts from across the system in the process. A demonstration of the new method, the NETworked Hazard Analysis and Risk Management System (NET-HARMS), will be provided