Cognitas are working for, and with, the dive community aiming to improve diving safety by providing a confidential, open reporting system, allowing divers to report mistakes, errors, lapses or violations. Thus creating a system that can provide other divers with a database of experience from which they could learn.

Every year in the UK there are on average 16 fatalities and 400 reported incidents within the sport of recreational diving, as shown by the figures from the Annual BSAC Diving Incident Reports.

The majority of those reports submitted do not come from divers directly, but from professionals such as the RNLI, Coastguard or Emergency Recompression chamber. Unfortunately, this means that the real number of reportable incidents taking place is far higher than this. For example, there are 3.5x as many divers recompressed than reported through the BSAC Incident Reporting system.  There are many reasons why this might be the case; ‘can’t be bothered’, pride, fear of ridicule, commercial and financial pressures and many others, but the bottom line is that there are opportunities for divers to learn from these incidents if they were reported and accessible via an easy and simple process.


We believe that such a system should allow divers to report their incidents or near-miss incidents in a confidential manner. We believe that having a system which shows the true levels of incidents would likely dispel machismo or bravado behaviour by showing that everyone makes mistakes and, consequently, increase the number of incidents reported and the quality said reports. A system should allow divers to access those reports, with identifying data removed, in a much shorter timescale than currently available, which means they can amend their current practices or adopt new practices if required. Civil and Military aviation communities already have such practices in place and safety records have improved as a consequence.

Update - 3 September 2010

The report into "Incident Reporting in the UK Recreational Diving Industry - An Assessment of Current Practices and Potential Ways to Improve Them" has now been published and can be downloaded from the 'Report' page linked above.  The Annexes and Executive Summary which includes recommendations are also available from the same page.