You may have said the benefits are independent travel, coordination control, exercise and social benefits through participating in bike sports. The risks may be injury, getting lost, the bike being stolen and coping with traffic and road rules. The risks could be minimised by wearing appropriate protective equipment, planning your trips, ensuring you lock the bike with a padlock, riding in quieter areas and learning the road rules.
Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
There will always be an element of risk in whatever we do but we minimise these so we can experience opportunities that provide us with growth and development. With structured planning around foreseeable risks, we adhere to our duty of care.
REMEMBER: By not providing people with the opportunity to take risks in everyday activities we are breaching our duty of care as there is foreseeable harm that they will not learn and develop.
Learning Topic 1 Demonstrate an understanding of legislation and common law relevant to work role
This topic should provide you with the ability to identify the various legislative requirements that will guide your practices as an ethical community services worker. You will learn to:
demonstrate an understanding of legislation and common law and how it applies to your workplace; and
demonstrate an understanding of how to maintain confidentiality and support clients in making decisions about service provision.
Section 1.4 Duty of care
This refers to the obligation to take responsible care to avoid injury to a person whom, it can be reasonably foreseen, might be injured by an act or omission. A duty of care exists when someone’s actions could reasonably be expected to affect other people. If someone is relying on you to be careful, and that reliance is, in the circumstances, reasonable, then it will generally be the case that you owe them a duty of care. You need to be clear about exactly what the nature of the care or support is that you are providing, and on which the person is relying. Failure to exercise care in that situation may lead to foreseeable injury or in other words, it could have been avoided with due care taken.
1.4.1 Standard of Care
Standard of care refers to what is expected of any other reasonable person/worker who performs the same duties. This is not about having to be the perfect worker but about being good enough and doing your job as well as any other worker. Judges when making their decisions regarding whether or not a worker has failed to provide a reasonable standard of care look at many factors such as:
A breach of duty of care exists when it is proven that the person who is negligent has not provided the appropriate standard of care. That is, the worker (or agency) has done something that they shouldn’t have done or failed to do something they should have done.
1.4.3 Duty of care versus dignity of risk
Dignity of risk is the concept that recognises risk is a natural part of life that helps us to learn and develop. This almost seems in contradiction to duty of care that refers to an action or an inaction that could cause foreseeable harm.
In balancing the two, the benefits gained in undertaking an activity need to be weighed against the foreseeable risks and determining how these risks may be minimised.
Activity 1.3
1. What are the benefits of learning to ride a bike?
