FMC plans to resign from the MSC

MSC ceasing their instruction courses was utter madness. I think some of the burden to fill this gap then fell on not-quite-prepared community tramping clubs and the like. Interesting that in that article, FMC also had a bit of a dig at the MSC "Walk in the Park" report.

I'm sad with how MSC's changed. It failed to adapt to the changing ways people are visiting the outdoors, imho, and then tried to adapt completely the wrong way.

@si-dog, The FMC gave more detailed reasons on their thoughts of the MSC's "Walk in the Park" report in one of the more recent Backcountry magazines. My impression of that article was the FMC didn't find the data analysis deep or insightful enough to provide much value. On the other hand MSC were pulling data from a number of different sources that each have their own reasons/requirements for that data, and combining all that data for another purpose would be a challenge.

I think at least part of FMC's argument is (hugely paraphrased by me) that the data isn't suitable for the purpose it's being used. The fact that there's no better data available doesn't make it reasonable for the MSC to irrationally draw conclusions from the garbage data that it has simply because it wants to produce a report with conclusions in it. Another criticism of FMC is that the MSC's approach encourages a purely numbers analysis of incidents that cannot be usefully understood with those sorts of metrics. That in turn encourages some of the related industries, like safety and insurance, to make inappropriate box-ticking decisions which could have serious effects on outdoor users. The fact that the analysis is based on inappropriate data to begin with makes it worse.

the stats in the walk in the park report were misleading, you cant just spit out numbers like that, you have to take into account what the standard rate of medical problems and accidents of the population as a whole in day to day life and then you have to compare the stats you get in the hills. if you have a medical issue while exercising in the outdoors, the issue isnt necessarily related to being in the outdoors at all. you just happened to have a medical event while you were in the outdoors, you have to show how many more accidents and events there are over and above the general population in day to day life... so the stats were useless. if you have a heart attack or stroke while exercising, you had a preexisting medical condition, you were going to have a heart attack or stroke anyway, tramping brought it on sooner perhaps but its not the root cause of that medical event, ok you're more likely to have a heart attack while exercising hard but you could be doing any exercise in day to day life to bring it on, so tramping doesnt make it more risky than other activities... you fall over tramping and have a minor injury, people do that everywhere in life, what you want to know is , is there an increased likelihood and what is it? not just how many people have injuries tramping...