Eurobodalla Shire Council’s Bay Pavilions Arts and Aquatic Centre was awarded Excellence in Aquatic Supervision at the Royal Lifesaving Awards Gala (The Aquas) last Friday, 14 April.
The Aquas is Royal Life Savings night of nights to recognising individuals and organisations’ outstanding contributions, effort, and dedication in preventing drowning and promoting aquatic participation across the Community, Government, Media, Industry, and Corporate sectors.
Managed by Aligned Leisure in partnership with the Eurobodalla Shire Council, the Bay Pavilions Arts and Aquatic Centre provides the local community with state-of-the-art facilities, including a theatre, pools, water slides and splash park. Opening in June 2022, the Bay Pavilions was immediately embraced by Eurobodalla locals and tourism to the area, seeing over 100,000 visitors within the first six months.
The award recognised the innovative strategies the Bay Pavilions team implemented to keep the Eurobodalla community and thousands of tourists safe, including:
- Collaborating with Royal Life Saving Australia to create an Aquatic Supervision Plan that included a Lifeguard Deployment Plan, ensuring sufficient lifeguards are on duty to cope with an increased number of customers.
- Creating a digital marketing campaign to promote the Keep Watch messaging.
- Introducing an innovative traffic light system to communicate the current customer capacity during peak visiting times.
- Increasing lifeguard in-service training from the recommended three-monthly basis to every two months.
These measures proved a huge success for Bay Pavilions, who received nearly a perfect score in their first-ever Compliance and Aquatic Facility Safety Assessment.
To receive this prestigious award after already being recognised as a Five-star Aquatic Safety Partner is really pleasing to see.
Chris Tague, Eurobodalla Arts and Leisure Manager
“Our team have embraced aquatic safety, especially our lifeguards, who continue to contribute at every opportunity for regular training.
“The Eurobodalla community can be proud that the Bay Pavilions is not only a world-class facility but one that also provides elite life-saving standards.
“We would also like to congratulate the Royal Life Saving NSW team on the inaugural Aquas and thank them for supporting the successful opening of the Bay Pavilions”.
