Marine Medical Forms have to be completed by all participants of an Opwall expedition that are undertaking an expedition with a marine component. There are two aspects to it, a liability form and a medical form to check if you won’t be at risk when undertaking marine activities.
The Marine Medical form opens in the October before your expedition, as it needs to be filled in one year prior to your course. Once it is open and available to you, it needs to be completed as soon as possible. The reason for this is that after completing the medical form you may need to get it signed by a doctor or dive medic. And gaining signatures from dive medics/doctors can often take significantly longer than you may anticipate. This can, in certain cases, take a few months to complete.
You will not be allowed to get into the water if the marine medical form is not completed by the time of your expedition.
If you are having a problem with your form visit our ‘frequently asked questions’ on this page by clicking here
Your form can be accessed by clicking the “Your marine medical documents for this booking” link in orange, on the front page of the portal. Complete all sections and then click submit.
When the form is completed, you will be faced with one of three outcomes:
If you need to see a doctor or dive medic, please book an appointment as soon as possible. Snorkellers will never be asked to get the form signed.
The forms for school students have to be completed by both a student account and a parent/guardian account. In order to do this, it is important that the school student and their parent/guardian are logging into their own accounts; you should always see your own name in the top right hand corner.
The form has to be completed by the student account before the parental one.
When logging in as the student, click the orange “Your marine medical documents for this booking” button on the front page. You then need to complete the form in full and click submit. When this is done, you will receive a message saying that your parent/guardian now has to agree to the form.
The parent/guardian account then needs to complete the process. Logging in as the parent, you first need to click the “Dependants” button, followed by the “Current Booking/Marine Medical documents” and finally the “Marine Medical Documents (You need to sign).”
The information that the student has completed will be shown. Once you’ve read through and are happy with their answers, please agree and submit.
When the form is completed, you will be faced with one of four outcomes:
If you need to see a doctor or dive medic, please book an appointment as soon as possible. Snorkellers will never be asked to get the form signed.
If you’ve been asked to see a doctor or dive medic, this means you’ve been identified as potentially at risk while diving due to your medical history.
This isn’t a problem – around 20% of our divers every year fall into this category, and almost all will be able to get signed off and dive with no problem at all. The important thing however is to make sure that you will be safe and get your condition checked.
The portal puts people into two categories: Low-Risk and High-Risk. Those that fall into the high risk category will be asked to see a dive medic instead of a normal doctor, physician or GP. This is normally due to having a condition that has a known negative interaction with diving.
We’ve collated a list of dive medics that you can find here: https://www.opwall.com/dive-doctors/
We will not be able to accept a form signed by a regular doctor if we’ve asked you to see a dive medic.
Once you’ve got the form signed by a doctor or a dive medic, you need to scan the form and upload it to the portal.
You can do this by going back to the marine medical form section and clicking the “Upload Signed Pages” button.
Documents or images must be 5Mbytes or less in size, in either JPEG, PNG or PDF formats. Please note that when uploading a JPEG or PNG there is also a size limit of 3000 x 2000 pixels.
Once you’ve uploaded the documents, make sure you click the green “I am finished uploading signed marine documents” button.
The forms will the be passed to us to double check them – if there are any issues we will contact you directly.
Once submitted to us, you won’t be able to edit the form directly yourself. We can re-open it so that you can edit it, but we need confirmation of which conditions were filled in incorrectly. Please send an email to portal@opwall.com stating which conditions you filled in incorrectly.
For example, please state “I do not have a head injury with loss of consciousness in the past five years” if that were the question you mistakenly answered yes to.
Most doctors surgeries are willing to sign marine medical forms under private practice, but some occasionally do not offer it as a service. If this is the case, we recommend you contact a specialist dive medic instead (https://www.opwall.com/dive-doctors).
Opwall diving standards are particularly conservative due to the nature of our expeditions, how remote most of our sites are, and the type of participants that undertake our projects.
Additionally, over the last number of years we’ve had a number of instances where individuals that were not fit to dive were signed off by their own doctors/GPs due to a misunderstanding of how diving can be impacted by various common medical conditions. In order to try and reduce the risk of this happening, we consulted with a number of hyperbaric and diving specialists to help us identify those at a higher level of risk, or suffering from conditions that are frequently deemed incorrectly “safe” by non-diving doctors.
This is the logic the portal system uses to determine who needs to see a dive medic. As an organisation we are not able to make a clinical decision to override the medical advice that has been passed to us, so we cannot make exceptions.
Per PADI/SSI standards all conditions have to be signed off regardless of their severity or when they last occurred, so we cannot make any exceptions.
In addition, any mild or historical conditions may still cause issues while at depth even if they don’t impact you in your day to day life. It is always worth getting things double checked to ensure your safety.
If your scan is too large to upload to the portal, no problem. You can either choose to re-scan it at a lower quality, reduce the size of the image using image editing, or contact portal@opwall.com for assistance.
The other option is to use a ‘file compressor’ website – if you google ‘file compression,’ a few will show up where you can upload the form/images and this will compress them to a size you can then upload onto the portal.
The Marine Medical documents on the portal are completely separate from any qualifications you currently have or are going to receive. You can complete them at any point.
Yes. All dive professionals hired by Opwall are qualified under PADI/SSI, so you will be supervised in the water by them. It is a PADI/SSI requirement that all divers supervised by their qualified staff have completed the relevant marine medical documents.
Yes. You will be supervised in the water by PADI/SSI professionals, and it’s a requirement that anyone under their care has completed the PADI/SSI forms.
However, you will not be asked to get a signature by a doctor or a dive medic.
Yes, but only if the form was signed within 12 months of your expedition start date.
You also need to ensure you have the correct sign-off type. IE, if we require a dive medic signature but only a normal doctor signed your form, you will still need to see a dive medic.
That’s no problem, just take a photo using a phone and upload that. As long as the text is readable, a phone photo is fine.
If the image files are too large to upload onto the portal, you can use a ‘file compressor’ website – if you google ‘file compression,’ a few will show up where you can upload the form/images and this will compress them to a size you can then upload onto the portal.
The document needs to be filled in within one year of your course. This means we have the form locked until the October before your expedition and you will not have access to it yet. All other sections of the portal are open for editing though!
If the form has asked you to see a dive medic and they have stated they do not need to sign it – then please let them know it is part of Opwall’s health & safety standards, and it still needs to be signed. Opwall does have stricter regulations in place regarding health & safety in comparison to other dive centres.
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