Dive Pro Africa is proud to announce that our PADI Course Director Mark Slingo was featured in the most recent edition of the PADI Members Quarterly the Undersea Journal. In the article Mark talks about the benefits of scuba diving for handicapped divers. Scuba diving has recently been thrust to the forefront of rehabilitation programs for people with disabilities as it takes away many of the restrictions that people encounter on land such as being confined to a wheelchair.
Much of Mark’s work in scuba diving over the past few years has been devoted to assisting more people with handicaps to try scuba diving and become certified, as well as training fellow dive professionals to work with scuba divers with handicaps. Mark is actually a wheelchair user himself after an accident in 2005 left him confined to a wheelchair. He had just left university and been certified as a PADI Instructor, however did not let the wheelchair stop him and continued to teach PADI courses and take more instructor-level certifications until he attained the rank of PADI Course Director, the highest rating of dive professional that you can hold in PADI. He contends that actually in the water he is better than many of his able bodied peers and loves to pass the gift of scuba diving on to other in similar conditions. Read more about learning to work with scuba divers with disabilities below by clicking on the article thumbnails.
