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Abstract
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Having just finished reading "Analysis and Rebuttal of Development of an In-Water Intervention in a Lifeguard Protocol" (A&R) by Peter Wernicki, Peter Chambers, Roy Fielding, Terri Lees, David Markenson, Francesco Pia, and Linda Quan (2011), we were both disappointed and surprised for two reasons.
The purpose of the paper, "Development of in-water intervention (IWI) in a lifeguard protocol with analysis of rescue history" (Hunsucker & Davison, 2010) was to present the first example, as far as our research has been able to find, of a rigorous examination of how a rescue protocol can be implemented and verified. The paper included a large retrospective study of the effectiveness of that rescue protocol. The entire water park rescue protocol was developed as part of the National Aquatic Safety Company's (NASCO) mission to "reduce the loss of life due to drowning." We were surprised to find that there was nothing in the A&R paper that would assist in fulfilling this mission or anything that addressed how to improve current protocols in order to save more lives. It was simply a criticism of IWI, which is only one of six parts of the protocol.
The second surprise was that we had hoped that an analysis of 56,000 rescues would open a learned discourse on rescue techniques for lifeguards. Instead the A&R authors have chosen to ignore the results of the rescue history and to concentrate on reducing the discourse to a personal level. Their paper can be summarized, at least in our minds, as "You are doing something we aren't, and we don't like it." We have addressed every single concern over the use of IWI in a rescue protocol and described it in our paper.
The A&R authors seem to have missed the whole reason for our original paper. If so, then as the authors, that fault lies with us. We will attempt to do better in subsequent publications; however, there were several other points brought up by the A&R authors that need be addressed...
Language: en |