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About Gareth
Gareth first certified to dive in 2000 when on holiday and really loved it. However, he didn’t dive for 5 years before getting hooked when on a work trip in 2005 to Cape Town and then San Diego. At the same time he was studying for MSc which had a human factors module and realised that the training he had received was seriously lacking in terms of quality and consistency and thought that more could be done to improve his own skills. Once back in the UK he met up with a couple of GUE-certified divers and decided to start training through GUE having seen the consistency of quality when it came to the output from GUE diver-trainer programmes.
In 2006 he attained a Tech-pass in Fundies with approximately 40 dives to his name, Tech 1 (Normoxic OC Trimix) in 2007 and Tech 2 (Hypoxic OC Trimix) in 2008. Since then he has also certified on the JJ-CCR with TDI to Mod 1 (Heliotrox). However, due to the pressures of work, and the recognition that currency and competency are key to safe rebreather diving, he sold his JJ-CCR in 2017.
Gareth has dived mainly in cold waters around the UK but has travelled to Norway, the US, Canada, Mexico and Bonaire. His main passion underwater is wreck photography.
In 2010 Gareth started a part-time PhD examining the role of human factors in diving incidents, the aim of which was to provide a standard taxonomy by which incidents and accidents could be classified to facilitate the sharing of incident data around the globe. This is still ongoing.
Since Jan 2016 when the first pilot class was launched, Gareth has been delivering a number of different online and face-to-face human factors programmes to improve diver and team performance and ultimately safety. Since the launch, Gareth has trained more than 215 divers in face-to-face classes with students from multiple agencies and certification levels including HQ and ITT-level staff, Instructor Trainers, Course Directors, Instructors, Cave Divers, OC and CCR technical divers. He has taught across the globe from Seattle throughout the US, in Europe, the Middle East and Australia and New Zealand. The programmes, which focus on situational awareness, decision making, teamwork, communications and Just Culture, take the core skills and knowledge from aviation, oil and gas and healthcare and translate them to diving to improve safety. These classes are the only ones which put all this knowledge together in one programme. In April 2018, the online human factors skills in diving micro-class won Gareth the 2018 TekDiveUSA award for Innovation. You can view more about these programmes at http://www.thehumandiver.com
Gareth writes for a number of magazines and blogs focusing on human factors, human error and a Just Culture, all with a view to improving and changing attitudes with regards to learning from incidents and accidents. He has presented at numerous international diving and non-diving conferences on human factors, non-technical skills and a Just Culture and is the process of writing a book on the topic due to be published in 2018.
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