Park and recreation organizations that provide programs, camps, before- and/or after-school care and sports activities must also ensure participants’ safety so that parents have peace of mind their children are safe while in the care of staff.

Critical information like emergency contact details and health data are key to any safety plan for your organization and staff. Whether a participant trips and falls during an activity, experiences an allergic reaction to a bee sting, or there’s a flood or fire in the community center, having personal information available helps staff respond quickly and effectively.

Even if you have your safety processes established, there might be room for improvement, so we’ve put together three questions to ask yourselves before your camps get started this year.

1. How do we access critical participant information?

All emergency and medical information should be easily and quickly accessible whether staff are planning for a program in advance or responding to an emergency. Review the ways your staff currently access information and seek areas for improvement — the main things to consider are who has access to information and how long it takes them to find what they need.

Examples of questions you might ask:

• Does your rec management system allow frontline staff to access participant information, or is it limited to office staff?

• If you’re using paper forms, is it easy for staff to quickly find information in a single binder filled with hundreds of forms?

• Can your staff rely on the information in those paper forms? When was the last time they were updated, or when were they submitted in the first place?

• Can your team members carry those binders with them when they’re offsite, or do they have to call the main office to retrieve key information when they need it?

Our research shows that, on average, it takes at least five minutes to access information stored on paper forms, which has a huge impact on the safety and wellbeing of your participants. An online system with mobile app access allows your staff to quickly and easily access key information when it’s most important.

2. How do we keep participant information secure?

Living in an online age, privacy and security is of the utmost importance. Whether you use a rec management system or paper forms to collect emergency and medical information from participants, ask yourselves how you keep information safe:

• Who can access the information contained within those records (electronic or paper)? Staff should only have access to those participants they are responsible for, i.e. a summer camp leader should not be able to view participants in a winter camp.

• How do you protect the information stored in those records? Whether you’re in the office or offsite, think about how you prevent unauthorized access to information, i.e. password protection or a physical lock.

• Are the systems or processes you use compliant with the privacy legislation in your region? e.g. National legislation like HIPAA (United States) or the Privacy Act (Canada) and regional legislation like CCPA in California.

• When staff are no longer responsible for a camp, how do you remove access to participant information?

• Unless you’re required to archive records for licensing and retention purposes, how do you ensure participant records are properly destroyed once they’re no longer needed? You should have a process to ensure that records are not forgotten and that they’re completely destroyed so no one can access or find them in the future.

3. Are all our participants’ critical details accurate and current?

Even if you’re hosting a seasonal camp, chances are you opened registration a few months in advance and collected information at the same time. That leaves a lot of time between submitting a record and the camp itself — that’s a lot of time for key information to change.

We’ve found that, on average, 30 percent of paper forms fall out of date within four months of being completed, and 30 percent are incomplete or illegible. That means a lot of inaccurate, out-of-date participant records, which can have consequences when your staff needs to support a participant — whether they’ve experienced a medical emergency or they need to be picked up early or from a different location, the wrong information can impact the level of care provided.

To avoid this challenge, find a system in which parents can keep their family’s information up-to-date easily (and legibly!), so when they get a new phone number or change addresses, everyone can be sure that records are reliable. In addition, your team should be notified when information changes within that record too!

Michelle Kasmierski is the Senior Marketing Manager for ePACT, an NRPA Member Discount and an emergency network that works with recreation departments across the country to move medical and emergency information previously collected on paper forms to an online, secure, easy-to-use system. For more information, visit ePACT's page on our website.

Use the code NRPAePACT for an additional 15% off your setup fee!