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ON-SITE FIRST AID
DAN’s first aid training and oxygen grant programs prepare divers and dive professionals worldwide to act quickly and effectively to assist injured divers.
EXPERT MEDICAL CARE
DAN’s continuing medical education courses empower doctors and other health care professionals with the skills and knowledge they need to treat divers.
ACCESS TO CHAMBERS
Tune in for talks about advances in postdive bubble monitoring, emergency action planning, managing unusual dive accidents, and more. See the streaming schedule here.
The standard of care for many diving illnesses is recompression. Treatment delay is one of the most significant risk factors for a negative outcome when treating divers with decompression sickness or arterial gas embolism. Hence, an injured diver must be brought to the most appropriate, available treatment facility with as little delay as possible.
• DAN seeks a safety services coordinator to support its educational, safety-development, and outreach programs. Duties include monitoring and developing injury-prevention initiatives and fielding risk mitigation and training inquiries. This person will communicate with dive operators, dive professionals, and the public about mitigating risk and promoting operational safety in diving.
In a region already woefully short of adequate hyperbaric emergency services for divers, chambers from Mississippi to Northwest Florida are reportedly now filling up with Covid-19 patients fighting for their lives.
As reported earlier on this site, the closest decompression chambers to the popular Oriskany dive site and Florida Panhandle Shipwreck Trail are in Mobile, Alabama which is out of state—or in Fort Myers, more than 600 miles away.
Available at DAN.org/Return, the guide has helped thousands of people get back in the water safely in the past few months. Now, this new video brings the guide to life, highlighting the essential elements of a safe and successful return to diving after time away.
Dr. Moon is a professor of anesthesiology at Duke University and the medical director of the Duke Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. He is also a former medical director of DAN.
Throughout his 40-year career in dive medicine and research, Dr. Moon has sought to gain a better understanding of cardiorespiratory function on the human body when subjected to environmental conditions such as being deep underwater or at high altitude.
The DAN Internship Program was created more than 20 years ago to give qualifiedstudents valuable experience in dive safety research. While the program is still research-oriented, its scope has expanded over the years to include projects that focus on other facets of DAN’s mission to help divers in need of emergency medical assistance and to promote dive safety through education.
Throughout 2021, experts from DAN’s Research, Risk Mitigation, and Medical Servicesteams will give presentations on topics relevant to divers, dive pros and dive business owners as we look beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and resume diving and traveling.
Because DCS isn’t the most straightforward diving injury, myths and misconceptions about it tend to arise. DAN is committed to continually educating divers about it, and we’ve decided to clarify a few of the most common misconceptions about it to ensure that all divers are better able to recognize DCS, respond to it and get the treatment they need in time.
