CWA Blog Archive-Duties Of Care In Indoor Climbing Gyms Revisited

Duties Of Care In Indoor Climbing Gyms Revisited

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This article tackles the duty of care, a concept senior leaders know intimately from meetings with lawyers, policy-building, and sleepless nights, but which their staff often don't understand. The author's premise is that teaching staff about the duty of care is a critical step in liability management, and teaching it well, in a relatable, practical way, is necessary for buy-in and follow-through. Duty of care lives alongside liability, risk management, and negligence, but also, viewed rightly, alongside professionalism, ethics, and values. These are legal concepts more than hard rules, and many people's familiarity ends at the phrase itself, they've heard of it and grasp it intuitively but couldn't define or teach it. The author admits to being in exactly that position when starting in the industry. It was through training and certification as a Climbing Wall Instructor-Provider and experience as a Facility Manager that they learned to combine staff training with policies and procedures to create practical, effective liability management. To deepen the discussion, the author reached out to Garnet Moore, CWA Executive Director, and Heather Reynolds, Education Consultant, both CWI-Provider trainers, to explore how they view teaching duty of care. The throughline is that the duty of care can't remain locked in the heads of owners and lawyers, it has to be translated into terms frontline staff can understand and act on. Effective liability management isn't just having the right policies, it's ensuring the people executing them daily genuinely understand the responsibility they carry to gym users. By making an abstract legal concept relatable and combining that understanding with clear procedures, operators turn duty of care from a phrase staff have vaguely heard into a practical framework that shapes how they actually do their jobs, which is where real liability protection lives.

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This piece argues the duty of care can't stay locked in owners' and lawyers' heads, staff must understand it too. Drawing on CWI-Provider training and input from CWA's Garnet Moore and Heather Reynolds, it makes the case for teaching this abstract legal concept in relatable, practical terms so frontline staff act on it daily.