Introduction:
Scotland carries a disproportionate number of drowning fatalities in comparison to its UK neighbours. Due to the way in which data is captured in Scotland often very little is known about these fatalities. To help solve this issue, Water Safety Scotland, through the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), created the Drowning and Incident Review (DIR). DIR aims to ensure a comprehensive review after each accidental water-related fatality in order to gather relevant data and provide recommendations to help prevent future incidents. The benefits and limitations of DIR are already published (see McAvoy et al., 2022) but little is known about the creation and subsequent implementation of DIR.

Objectives:
This presentation will detail the creation of DIR. Additionally, the presentation will detail how the process took on board recent recommendations from McAvoy et al. (2022) and how it has been implemented both nationally and locally

Methods:
The creation of DIR was through stakeholder agreement and use of similar processes such as Child Death Reviews. It gathers necessary data and uses a modified Delphi process for recommendations. DIR went through a number of local and national pilots. Edits to DIR were through stakeholder engagement and local groups were created in a specific format in order to host and run DIR. These are known as Partnership Approach to Water Safety (PAWS) groups. Through these groups, DIR is able to link to preventative work in order to ensure recommendations from DIR’s are implemented.

Results:
DIR has been endorsed across Scotland by the key national Search and Rescue organisations, Health at Scottish Government level, and through a Ministerial Water Safety Action Plan. The process is both applicable to inland and coastal drownings and recommendations from pilot DIR’s have already improved the safety in local areas and high-risk hot spots and are known to have saved at least three lives to date.

Conclusion:
DIR is a sustainable and pioneering process which gathers relevant data and intelligence in relation to a drowning incident or near miss. The learnings of its creation, its uses and recent improvements, may help other countries who aspire to create a similar process. Future research should consider how DIR can be adapted for use in other settings, as well as how the data from DIR relates to risk analysis and drowning statistics.