Swimming Pool & Spa Safety Standards [POOL-01-EN]

Swimming Pool & Spa Safety Standards [POOL-01-EN]

Aquatic facilities integrated into healthcare rehabilitation units, hotel-based wellness centres, and community fitness complexes represent a category of environment where lapses in water quality management, physical safety infrastructure, and infection control can produce rapidly scalable harm. Recreational water illnesses — including those caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Cryptosporidium, and Legionella species — remain among the most consistently underreported healthcare-associated risks in institutional settings, with the WHO estimating that inadequately managed aquatic environments contribute to tens of millions of gastrointestinal and respiratory infections globally each year. In Georgia and across the South Caucasus, expanding investment in medical tourism, rehabilitative hydrotherapy, and wellness infrastructure has heightened the operational and regulatory obligations placed on facility managers and clinical teams alike. Accreditation bodies including the Accreditation Service for Hospitals (ASF) in Georgia now subject aquatic facility protocols to structured survey review, making systematic competency in this domain a professional and institutional necessity rather than an optional specialisation.

This course is grounded in the WHO’s Guidelines for Safe Recreational Water Environments, Volume 2: Swimming Pools and Similar Environments, supplemented by ISO 17025-aligned water testing frameworks, JCI Environment of Care standards, and applicable Georgian national sanitary norms governing public and healthcare-associated aquatic facilities. Content is delivered through case-anchored learning sequences that move from foundational microbiology and chemistry principles to operational protocol design and survey-readiness assessment, enabling participants to translate regulatory requirements directly into facility-specific practice rather than generic compliance checklists.

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Distinguish between the microbiological and chemical hazard profiles of swimming pools versus spa and hydrotherapy environments, and explain why each demands a differentiated risk management approach.
• Interpret WHO and Georgian regulatory thresholds for free residual chlorine, pH, turbidity, and temperature, and apply these parameters to real-time water quality monitoring records.
• Implement a facility-specific water safety plan aligned with the WHO preventive risk management framework, incorporating hazard identification, critical control points, and corrective action procedures.
• Evaluate existing aquatic facility infrastructure — including filtration systems, drainage design, anti-entrapment devices, and emergency egress points — against ASF survey criteria and JCI Environment of Care standards.
• Design staff training and incident response protocols that address recreational water illness outbreaks, near-drowning events, and chemical exposure scenarios specific to healthcare and wellness settings.
• Demonstrate readiness for ASF accreditation surveys by constructing a compliant documentation portfolio that includes maintenance logs, staff competency records, risk assessments, and corrective action reports.

Who Should Attend

This course is designed for infection control practitioners, facility and environmental services managers, physiotherapists and hydrotherapy specialists, and quality and patient safety officers working in accredited or accreditation-seeking hospitals, rehabilitation centres, spa-integrated wellness facilities, and medical tourism establishments across Georgia and the broader South Caucasus region. It is equally relevant to public health inspectors and sanitary-epidemiological service staff responsible for regulatory oversight of healthcare-adjacent aquatic environments. No prior specialist knowledge of aquatic safety is required; the course is structured to benefit both professionals new to this regulatory domain and experienced practitioners seeking to formalise and update their competency.

Course Structure

The course is delivered fully online through the GMJ Academy platform in a self-paced format, with an estimated study time of four to five hours inclusive of interactive scenario exercises and a summative knowledge assessment requiring a minimum passing score of 75 percent. Participants who successfully complete the course will receive a GMJ Academy certificate of completion eligible for submission toward continuing professional development records in accordance with applicable Georgian Medical Council and institutional CPD frameworks.