Diving safety, as the medical and safety bodies publish it.

This section is a reference to what the bodies that study diving accidents and diving medicine have published. It is not a safety course. Skills, dive planning, decompression, rescue and first aid are taught in person by an instructor from a recognised agency, and nothing on these pages replaces that training. Whether a person is fit to dive is decided by a physician, or in the UK club system by a UKDMC Medical Referee, never by a web page.

How these pages are written

• Every figure has an owner, and a date where the source gives one. A statistic is given with the report it comes from, the year it covers and its authors. A flying-after-diving interval is given as the named body's published recommendation, with the scope that body states.
• Illnesses are named and described, not treated. Descriptions come from Divers Alert Network (DAN) and other medical bodies. Each one needs prompt medical care from a doctor, and the pages say so.
• Disagreements are shown. Where DAN, PADI, BSAC, SDI or an aviation body say different things, each version is given with who says it.
• Gaps are admitted. Where a report or form could not be read, the page says so rather than filling the gap.

What is in this section

Start with what the accident data shows, which explains how DAN and BSAC collect incident data and what the published analyses found. Two pages describe diving illnesses as DAN describes them: decompression sickness and barotrauma, and other diving illnesses such as immersion pulmonary oedema and nitrogen narcosis. Flying after diving sets the 2002 DAN workshop's published recommendation beside what PADI, a TDI blog and the FAA's Aeronautical Information Manual, as others quote it, say.

Fitness to dive covers what DAN publishes about age and heart health and how the screening forms hand the decision to a physician or medical referee. Buddy and solo diving sets out the agencies' positions, and diving within your training gathers what agencies say about limits and what the fatality studies found about breaches of safe practice.

The last three pages look outward. Environmental hazards covers currents, cold, marine life and overhead environments as DAN and the NSS Cave Diving Section describe them. Dive insurance and chambers describes cover by category and how DAN works with recompression chambers. Protecting reefs and marine life gathers NOAA, Project AWARE and Green Fins guidance.

Related reading

For how medical screening forms work, see medical screening in the Learn section. For the depth each agency publishes for each card, see depth limits by certification. Terms used across the site are explained in the glossary.