More to the point, what's the benefit of making caving callout members do all the surface stuff if they want to be part of the team?
This was a genuine question - what's the benefit of making all rescuers train for/attend surface jobs? I know people are uncomfortable speaking "on behalf" of their particular teams, so maybe we can do it hypothetically?
From a teamwork perspective it's important to know the whole team so that you can work effectively together, so training entirely independently wouldn't be a good idea, so that would have to be addressed in how the training was designed. But since there's so much crossover (e.g. first aid, comms, z-rigs, night nav) there should be a lot of opportunity for joint training.
It's also not always easy to find people to volunteer to run trainings, so if you're essentially running two separate training/onboarding flows for surface and underground then that's potentially twice the admin, planning, and volunteering effort. This is probably quite a substantial consideration.
Demonstrating investment in the team might be a reason to require training in areas that don't seem immediately relevant to a rescuer. Callouts are mostly waiting around, logistics, cleaning kit etc., so having team members just do the bits they want to isn't necessarily all that helpful, although drawing the line at "you have to do 95% surface work" feels a little extreme.
Would having two groups within the team diminish the number of rescuers willing to do surface work to such an extent that a mixed team would struggle to resource it? That's a concern, and I can see how being too atomic might cause resourcing problems like this.
Organisational inertia probably plays a role, but that's not a benefit as much as a reason. Any other ideas?
issues with membership have been snowballing quite a while now so I think there's a reason many people (the majority being active members of cave rescue themselves) feel a bit disgruntled by it. Not sure if disgruntled is the right word but it's certainly a fun word
