Constant supervision of bathing in French public swimming pools: an unrealistic regulatory requirement?

ABSTRACT

In France, to prevent drowning accidents in public swimming pools (PSPs), bathing must be constantly supervised by qualified staff. However, fatal drowning regularly occurs in supervised aquatic facilities. A review of the literature shows that human supervision is a complex task. The aim of this research is to fully assess the periods during which supervision is not carried out, or carried out in an inadequate manner. The observations made in 108 French PSPs show that supervision is not carried out 18% of the time and that it is carried out inadequately 33% of the time. The medical literature shows that, in order to expect to survive without after-effects, an immersed victim requires intervention within a time limit of not more than three minutes; however, we noted, over a total observation time of 54 hours, 147 periods (29.8%) during which the supervision system was degraded for three minutes or more. This quantification research on the periods of degraded supervision is complemented by an identification of the causes leading to these degradations, from which we can draw interesting areas for improvement, particularly from an organizational point of view, in order to improve safety management in French PSPs.

Keywords:

• drowning
• public swimming pool
• supervision
• lifeguard

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Source: Recensement des Equipements Sportifs (French National Inventory of Sports Facilities). Consulted on 10 December 2015 at http://www.res.sports.gouv.fr.

2. The term admission fee denotes the purchase of a ticket which may be specific to bathing or not (example of fitness centres where the payment may cover a set of services offered to customers).

3. French public swimming pools, outside school holidays, are sometimes open to the public for open swimming on a discontinuous basis. Indeed, they are intended to receive other user groups such as schools, associations and sports clubs and offer activities (aquatic fitness, for example) with different supervision procedures.

4. The mean survival rate after immersion drops to 25% after three minutes (whereas it is still 75% between 1 and 3 minutes) (Mathon, Aymard, Kretyl, & Levraut, 2011). To prevent after-effects, the victim should further be detected early (Szpilman & Soares, 2004), ideally in 10 seconds, so that the lifeguard can intervene in less than 30 seconds (10–30 rule developed by the Lifesaving Society of Canada).

Additional information

Funding

This study is part of a doctoral research funded by the agglomeration community of Caen la mer (France) and the Association Nationale de la Recherche et de la Technologie [grant number 2013-0024].