University Traveller Wellbeing and Risk Management

University Traveller Safety Solutions

Universities are becoming truly global in their focus and reach. Many have multi-country faculties that offer a wide range of courses and programmes for both inbound and outbound students and researchers. With this expansion, the need for robust safety and security solutions has never been higher. The world is easier to explore, transport is simple and relatively inexpensive and social media makes everything seem close to hand and safe.

Yet, the reality of overseas travel for some students, lecturers and employees is far from ideal. Illness, petty crime and cultural ignorance are common place and will negatively affect a travellers time overseas. For some, trips go working resulting in life threatening or life-changing events which could have been avoided. For a few very unlucky travellers serious injury or even loss of life has occurred.

As a University, you have a number of different needs to manage. These include:

• Your duty of care to employees and students
• Lecturers tend to be too focused on their research rather than more practical elements of their trip – that can be aloof and reluctant to training and control – they know best
• Employees travelling overseas for the University can be complacent and feel they are within the ‘air-con bubble’. “i’m insured and well looked after, what could go wrong?”
• Students feel they are invincible and have the naivety of youth. They will ‘wing it’ and care little for preparation, risk management or updating the University should something go wrong – unless it’s really serious.

So, what can the University do about these related needs? It’s simple and you probably have much of this in place already.

Step 1 – A robust Travel Safety Policy is a must. It should be written with input from all interested departments – travel, risk, health, insurance and finance. It should be simple, comprehensive and accessible. You should try and record that your travellers have read and understood it. Our Policy E-Learning course enables this to happen.

Step 2 – Risk assessments – these should focus on three areas:

• Country risk – available via specialist security companies or the FCO
• Person risk – how experienced is the traveller? Do they have world knowledge or perhaps never travelled further than France?
• Activity Risk – what will the traveller be doing when overseas? Are they adequately trained and equipped? Speak to your insurance manager and provider for further information.

Step 3 – Training – all travellers should be trained on the policy, risk associated with the trip and anything else appropriate. Planet Wise offers appropriate levels of training for each of these areas. We help provide part of the audit trail for Universities should duty-of-care have to be proved.

Step 4 – Audit Trail – you now have the three main steps in place to satisfy legislation such as the 1974 Health and Safety at Work act. Have a Policy, complete risk assessments and then train staff to adhere to them. If

Watch the video to find out more