When submitting a club trip, you are asked to provide details of a safety person for the trip. This page has some guidelines for trip leaders and their safety person.

What the safety person should know

• Route details, including intended camping locations and expected timings
• Details of trip participants including any relevant medical conditions
• Number plates of the vehicles taken on the trip
• Safety equipment being carried, eg PLB/EPIRP/Sat phone

Safety person should be kept up to date

If for example, you're going to the Blue Mountains for a few one-day canyons, you should if at all possible notify your safety person at the end of each day and of any change of plans. For example, a quick SMS saying "Finished Claustral Canyon, intend to do Whungee Wheengee tomorrow, Bill sick, caught train back home". You don't want a situation where on Monday morning, your safety person has to call up a search party and say "Uh, they're in the Blue Mountains"

Allow some time for unexpected eventualities

The trip leader and the safety person should agree on a reasonable time when the trip should be reported missing. This should allow some time for the unexpected. So being a few hours late returning from a long day walk probably isn't cause for raising the alarm just yet. If the group is carrying a PLB/EPIRB/Sat phone then the time allowed can probably be increased somewhat, since the fact that these haven't been used probably indicates that they're still OK, but just late. The time the alarm should be raised should be decided by the trip leader. Make sure your safety person knows this time (don't just put it in the trip submission form).

What the safety person should do if the trip is overdue

After trying to phone the participants of the trip, the next thing to do is probably to call the club president or vice president. Ideally the trip leader might have provided the safety person with details of everyone going on the trip, but if not, the president or vice president will be able to access these on the web site. After you've tried the mobiles of a few more people on the trip and decided that the alarm needs to be raised, contact the Bushwalkers Wilderness Rescue Squad and the police.

When a safety person probably isn't needed

Most of the activities the club does would always need a safety person. For example canyons and bushwalks should probably always have one. The one activity where things are a little different is climbing (and abseiling practice sessions). In the case of climbing in more remote areas, you're effectively bushwalking as well, so need one. But if you're going to Nowra, you're a short walk from the car and within mobile reception the whole time, it's probably not needed. Likewise, if you're going to Arapiles, the whole trip isn't going to get lost in the bush. Somewhere like Arapiles or Booroomba, make sure other people on the trip know which climbs you're doing for the day. The safety person fields on club trips are mandatory. This forces you to think if you need one. If you decided that you definitely don't, just put "N/A" in the fields. That way when you do a trip that does need a safety person you'll be more likely to take it more seriously.