The New Zealand Mountain Safety Council (MSC) works closely with council member organisations and partners to access a wide range of data about participation and incidents in the outdoors.
This data is analysed by the MSC alongside input from council member organisations and partners, insights pertaining to outdoor safety issues are generated, often in the form of insights publications.
These insights are shared with the wider outdoor recreation sector, especially organisations who have an interest in outdoor safety or play a role in providing or managing outdoor recreation spaces. Insights form the foundation of MSC’s evidence-based decision-making process, which is essential to ensuring an informed and measured approach to implementing issue specific outdoor safety prevention initiatives.
Tongariro Alpine Crossing ISAG 2019
MSC identifies specific outdoor safety issues through the analysis of relevant outdoor safety data, development of insights publications or infographics as well as connecting and sharing knowledge with council member organisations and partners. These issues may be related to high injury, search and rescue or fatality numbers (or rates), or the potential for multiple series harm incidents. When these specific safety issues have been identified and the necessary insights generated to understand them, the MSC will form and facilitate an ‘issue specific advisory function working group’ whose purpose will be to develop targeted prevention focused intervention/s in an effort to suppress the specific issue.
Each issue specific advisory function working group will consist of members with expertise relevant to the issue at hand, this will extend beyond activity based technical knowledge to include all possible professional disciplines who could contribute to a successful outcome.
Each issue specific advisory function working group will exist for the sole purpose of addressing a specific issue, and on completion of that process/implementation of the intervention, the working group will disband.