What is survival swimming?
The Royal Life Saving Society has long advocated for Survival Swimming, which aims to equip children and adults with the skills to survive an unexpected fall into water. This advocacy culminated during the Society’s 125th anniversary year when it set an ambitious goal for drowning prevention: “The implementation of Survival Swimming in every Commonwealth nation during 2016.”
In countries where Survival Swimming programs are established, individuals have a greater ability to be safe in and around water. They learn essential skills such as floating, treading water, propelling themselves through the water, and using buoyancy aids to remain afloat and save themselves. For nations lacking such programs, the goal was to assist them in adopting these crucial initiatives.
The objective is to ensure that one day, every person in the Commonwealth will have access to learn survival swimming or basic swimming and water safety skills.
Why survival swimming?
In 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) published “Preventing Drowning: Practical Guidance for the Provision of Day Care, Basic Swimming and Water Safety Skills, and Safe Rescue and Resuscitation Training.” While comprehensive, the guidance was relatively high-level and lacked practical advice for applying these recommendations, particularly in low-resource settings.
To address this, the RNLI, WHO, and the Royal Life Saving Society Commonwealth co-hosted workshops focused on swimming in Zanzibar and on rescue and resuscitation in India. These workshops concentrated on key areas identified in the WHO guidance that required additional technical support, including:
- Swimming and Water Safety Skills
- Safe Rescue and Resuscitation Training
- Site Safety Auditing
- Fear of Disease Transmission
- Medical Screening of Participants
- Age-Appropriate Rescue Training
- Informed Consent
- Monitoring and Evaluation
- Emergency Action Planning
- Refresher Training
Essential work was done to identify barriers to delivery and to co-design resources that could assist organizations in these safety-critical areas. Implementing activities in a Survival Swimming program can provide children with vital life-saving skills, offering a lifelong protective effect against drowning.
In an ideal world, everyone would receive lessons to learn to swim. Unfortunately, various factors prevent many people from having this opportunity. Even in developed countries, a significant portion of the population never learns to swim. Those who do not swim, particularly young children who live, work, and play in or around water, are at a high risk of drowning.
Survival swimming has proven to be an effective strategy for drowning prevention and has been implemented in many Commonwealth countries, including Bangladesh, Canada, India, and Malaysia.
The aim of implementing Survival Swimming in every Commonwealth nation is not to replace traditional swimming lessons but to teach the basic, fundamental skills necessary for surviving an unexpected fall into water. This is a crucial first step towards being safe around water, with a focus on survival and getting to safety.
Survival Swimming Lesson Sharing Workshop
As previously mentioned, the 2022 “Preventing Drowning” guide included recommendations for teaching basic swimming and water safety as part of drowning prevention activities. Since then, several publications have provided practical guidance for key interventions; however, they remain high-level summaries with little detail on implementation within low-resource settings and lack detailed guidance for safety-critical components.
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), in collaboration with the RLSS, conducted international sharing workshops for organizations already delivering basic survival swimming in low-resource contexts. These workshops aimed to identify and agree on current best practices for implementing safety-critical components. The output documents, or toolboxes, from these workshops are being finalized and will be available as drafts through 2025 to complement the second edition of the Survival Swimming Guide.
