Safer Gambling Week 2022 at EPIC Risk Management
Though EPIC Risk Management will never stray from the mantra that striving for a safer gambling environment for all should be a 24 hours a day, 365 days a year aspiration, this year’s Safer Gambling Week (17th-23rd October) provides a heightened platform for us to promote the hard work that our team undertakes all year round to take the problem out of gambling.
This year’s awareness week falls in a typical period for the company, with a mix of education sessions in schools, delivery of programmes in professional sport and speaking opportunities at key industry conferences and seminars being among a mix of important calendar dates for the EPIC staff.
As such, we will use the week as a chance to highlight what we’re doing and why we do it, with a mission of preventing gambling from harming people and organisations underpinning that purpose.
To give a flavour of the volume of work that EPIC Risk Management undertakes in a typical week, this week alone we will be delivering:
• Education sessions to children aged 14+ at eight UK schools (a mix of state and private secondary schools)
• Multiple gambling harm awareness seminars to student-athletes across three NCAA college campuses in the US
• Lived experience presentations to two English professional sports clubs
• Speaking obligations at a mix of conferences and seminars covering safer gambling and player protection in London, Amsterdam and Melbourne
• Hosting a round-table discussion of major Australian sports institutions to help identify where the issue of gambling harm could be most prevalent within their organisations
• Two sessions delivered to customer-facing staff at major industry operators to assist with harm identification and prevention
• Appearance on a European Safer Gambling Week webinar, discussing ‘Harnessing data and technology to make online gambling safer’
• A free online webinar telling one of our lived experience stories to a public audience
Lived experience will be at the heart of all of the above events, with staff who have endured the effects of gambling harm using the knowledge, insight and understanding that personal experience brings to improve lives.
Such sessions are typically targeted at high-risk sectors where the statistics show a higher probability of gambling harm occurring, such as the criminal justice service, education, military, sport, financial services, construction and the gambling industry itself.
“There are a number of reasons why institutions should always keep safer gambling and player protection at the forefront of their thinking,” explains Dan Spencer, EPIC’s director of safer gambling.
“Problem gambling can manifest itself in any number of ways, and this can have an adverse effect on performance, damage reputations or leave companies at risk of breaching regulatory compliance.
“Most organisations will also feel that they have a duty of care, welfare and conscience to protect employees and customers as a matter of public health, taking into account the implications on wider society.
“Any of these reasons in isolation, or a combination of several such factors, are a valid cause for companies to reach out and work with us, hence why we greatly value the opportunity to work with such a wide variety of sectors all year round, and deliver on our business mission: ‘learning from lived experience, we aim to take the problem out of gambling’.”
Anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of the harm that can occur as a consequence of problem gambling is urged to sign up for our free webinar that will premiere on Thursday 20th October at 4pm, ‘Marc Williams: My Problem Gambling Story’.
The former Wales U21 professional footballer will tell his lived experience story and the profound effect that it has had on both his own life and those around him. A session that he delivers every week to a mixture of secondary schools, professional sports clubs and customer-facing staff from gambling operators is being made available free of charge to those who pre-register via Event Brite here, so that they can get a sense of the real-life issues that stem from problem gambling and the impact that an EPIC Risk Management education session can potentially have on audiences.
