Establishing a benchmark for safety in equestrian sports.
Equestrian NSW
Industry
Sport and Recreation
Use Cases
Team Culture & Engagement
Driving direction
Reporting Performance
How Equestrian NSW is galloping towards data-driven safety decisions
From 41% to 71% in safety culture maturity
“f you don’t have data, you don’t know what’s going on and it’s very hard to improve. Now we have good data and we can make more sensible decisions based on reality rather than someone’s opinions and perceptions.”
Vireena Peacock, CEO, Equestrian New South Wales
The Challenge
Equestrian New South Wales is committed to fostering a dynamic equestrian community and igniting a passion for equestrian activities. They are focused on ensuring fair rules and regulations for competitions and promoting the sport to ensure its continued growth and vitality.
Event organisers, officials and coaches are required to complete risk assessments, health and safety checks, and report injuries and incidents. However, Equestrian NSW faced challenges in consistently collecting this safety data and converting it into a format that could provide useful information and insights. As a result, the organisation lacked a clear understanding of safety issues and were making decisions based on perceptions rather than reality.
“We had a reporting system, but didn’t have an overall framework for how safety should be managed within the sport. We also didn’t have a process for managing issues or actually even tracking the quality or type of issue or incident that we were having within equestrian sport,” says Vireena Peacock, Equestrian NSW CEO.
Equestrian NSW was introduced to Safe365 through Sports New South Wales, which offered free access to the platform for small sports in the state. After a facilitated Safety Index session, Equestrian NSW saw how Safe365 could provide a comprehensive suite of tools for their sport.
“We could assess where we were in a framework in terms of a safety system and performance, as well as capturing incidents and developing checklists to support the organisation.”
The Approach
Since April 2023, Equestrian NSW has been using Safe365 to better capture, track and improve organisational safety. Following their initial Safety Culture Maturity Index, the organisation has delivered 10 improvement projects, with the aim to lay a foundation and expectations across the organisation. As a result, they have been making incremental and targeted improvements to shift towards a proactive safety culture, and continue to explore different ways to use the system to support their sport. This has included:
Identifying trends and insights
By ensuring all injuries and incidents have been put into Safe365, Equestrian NSW is able to use PowerBI to analyse trends and look deeper into incidents. They have also used the safety system assessment extensively.
Board visibility of safety
The reporting functionality allows Vireena to quickly compile detailed monthly safety reports for the board. By leveraging the centralised data, she can provide quantitative and qualitative insights into safety across the organisation. This improved visibility and comprehensive information has given the board a higher degree of confidence not only in the information they’re being given, but also in what’s going on from a safety perspective.
Digitising safety practices
They have made good use of the checklist functionality within Safe365 which has enabled them to customise things like event pre-audits.
Improving contractor inclusion in safety systems
Coaching in equestrian is mostly done by Equestrian Australia-accredited private coaches. Previously they were getting clients to sign a paper waiver form. Equestrian NSW created a checklist for the coaches for their indemnity forms.
Impact Made
Equestrian NSW have improved their overall safety system result from 41% to 71%, showcasing a 30 percent increase since initially coming on board. Key outcomes include:
Greater board confidence
Of all the modules, the one that Equestrian NSW is almost at 100% for is their board, director and management activities. That’s in sharp contrast to the findings of our Safe365 Insights Report [insert link] which found that director and management knowledge of risk management practice and the depth of awareness around their own industry-specific safety landscape falls short of what is needed, scoring 48% in maturity for director knowledge and 46.3% for manager knowledge.
Increased incident reporting
Equestrian NSW are seeing fewer serious incidents and more minor incidents being reported. “We’re starting to be optimistic that the work we’re doing is starting to feed into safer events and that people are getting more comfortable with reporting minor incidents. Reviewing the minor incidents will hopefully prevent serious ones.”
Understanding where to focus efforts
The organisation now has a greater understanding of where to focus their efforts to improve their safety culture maturity score. Knowing the gaps and what needs to be done feeds into their safety strategy and tactics.
Influence national safety in equestrian
Because Safe365 has been used so extensively and successfully in New South Wales, Equestrian NSW has the ability to influence the direction of where Equestrian Australia is going nationally with safety systems.
“I think if you can’t start at the top and get the top correct, it’s very hard to get the bottom correct,” says Vireena. “Our board and directors have signed on and understand what good looks like. For them it’s really important because they have an overall accountability for the organisation and its safety.”
Vireena Peacock, CEO, Equestrian New South Wales
What’s next?
For Equestrian NSW, the next target is a Safety Index Score of 75%. They have a clear roadmap that tells them what they need to do to reach this milestone and that includes a large focus on verification activities.
In addition to her role as CEO of Equestrian NSW, Vireena also assists in managing the national safety function for Equestrian Australia. “We’ve looked at a number of platforms from a national perspective and see Safe365 as the best option nationally for the equestrian industry.” Equestrian Australia is working with the team at Safe365 on customisation to make it a little bit more equestrian friendly in order to roll out the platform nationally. “The support Safe365 has provided and their commitment to understanding the nature of our sport and what we need is fantastic,” says Vireena.
“I have a lot more confidence that, as an organisation, we have the right things in place to manage safety for our sport.”
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