Place-Based Fatality Prevention in Action

Through this chapter we reflect on enacting a fatality prevention approach to safety management in outdoor environmental education. Fatality prevention rethinks a key understanding of safety in many contexts by asserting that where there exists the possibility of a fatality in an outdoor education program, however remote, that the magnitude of this consequence is so great that the (un)likelihood can never outweigh the priority that must be attributed to preventing that fatality. Such an approach shifts the focus of safety from limiting accidents, to holding fatality prevention at the centre of all decision-making. We describe our experience of enacting fatality prevention under three key ideas that guide our practice (1) determination to enact fatality prevention, (2) understanding previous fatality incidents, and (3) environment and place-based knowledge.