Whether it’s health, medical well-being or safety from harassment and assault, the people tasked with looking after crew and others say the work can’t stop where the regulations do.
If you want to understand how safety regulations change in yachting and the wider shipping world, Ted Morley suggests going all the way back to possibly the most famous regulatory failure ever to happen at sea. Before Titanic sank, he notes, the fact that large oceangoing vessels didn’t have enough lifeboats for all their passengers was not seen as a big deal.
“Now we laugh at that,” he says. “It’s so ridiculous to think that it didn’t matter back then somehow.”
Morley has nearly 40 years’ experience in yachting and shipping; today he’s CEO of Maritime Professional Training in Fort Lauderdale. He knows about regulations — and he knows when good training and safety need to go beyond them.
“Regulations change when the need becomes apparent,” he says. “The need becomes apparent when enough incidents or accidents happen to make the need apparent. It takes something that brings so much attention to it that culture can’t help but change.”
International medical, safety and security group MedAire is up on all the regulatory requirements, but, MedAire’s Emma Deal says, that’s where you begin, not where you end. Twenty-five years ago MedAire’s medical kits contained things that have only recently become regulatory requirements, she says.
“Our ethos, our methodology is not with compliance as a start point.”
What constitutes safety and security at sea has changed and evolved in recent years, both in a regulatory sense and culturally. Technology naturally plays a large role, but so does a shift in values and concerns. Crew safety and health is now more to the fore; that includes mental health and safety from sexual harassment, assault and bullying.
“We’ve seen a tremendous shift,” says Morley, who started in the industry as a deckhand 38 years ago. “‘Back in my day’ stories are great, but some of the ‘back in my day’ stories you wince and cringe at because things were really done poorly.”
An Ounce of Prevention
On the second Wednesday of every month, Yacht Medical International sets up shop at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale for Wellness Wednesdays, where they offer yacht-life-specific wellness advice and complimentary B12 shots for crew.
“Our primary focus is, we try to promote health and wellness, almost to the point where we’re talking ourselves out of a job,” says Ron Strescino, Yacht Medical International’s CEO.
What constitutes safety and security at sea has changed and evolved in recent years, both in a regulatory sense and culturally.
Part of the goal in medicine must always be prevention — fix people once they’re sick, but also stop that from happening. When the people in question may not have their own doctor and spend days or weeks away from any potential medical care other than emergency care, that becomes even more important.
For crew — often young, typically healthy and always busy — basic health needs aren’t always easy to focus on. When Strescino and the team get the chance to do some preventative work, they like to focus on basics.
“First and foremost is nutrition,” he says. “Second is going to be exercise, third is drugs and alcohol, staying away from that as much as possible.”
Stress can play a major role in breaking down all of those and more.
“The things they lean on in times of stress can be bad food, lack of sleep, lack of exercise,” he says. “Then you get into the drugs and alcohol, which people can lean on as a crutch. You cannot be Superman, there’s no such thing. It really comes down to your decision-making.”
MedAire offers an extension product that gives five counseling sessions per year to crew members.
“Mental health cases, if allowed to escalate, have a much higher disembarking rate than any other health problem,” Deal says.
Once somebody calls for help, they’re already at the tip of that iceberg. MedAire encourages crew to access support early. If you allow it to continue without that support, that’s not good for anybody. For MedAire, this involves using the same mental health service they use for their own employees.
“They need it more than we do,” she says, “because I can go home to my family every night and vent.”
Senior crew, she says, often need it even more because they have fewer peers on board to talk to. Attitudes around mental health on board have also changed. Fifteen or so years ago, Deal says, many attitudes amounted to “Nah, we’re one big happy family, we don’t need this, we’re good.” Now it’s different.
MedAire offers an extension product that gives five counseling sessions per year to crew members.
One piece of advice related to mental health Strescino gives to captains and HODs is do not be naïve about drug use. Yacht Medical International recently did drug screenings on a large vessel with a crew of more than 20, and everybody came back negative.
“I said to the captain, ‘this is amazing,’” Strescino says. “For a boat that big, that’s the exception. For us to go ‘oh wow’ — it shouldn’t be the case.”
Safety for All
On most yachts, Deal notes, the person with the medical officer qualification is the captain or first officer. That means that on most yachts, the person you go to with a medical concern is most frequently a man. This can become a problem when female crew members may not feel comfortable approaching a senior male about their own health, particularly something that might involve sexual health. This, Deal says, can lead to situations where problems don’t get dealt with until they are emergencies.
Then there are the cases of sexual harassment or assault. That’s a time when it can be critical to have a woman in a senior role on board.
“You’re not going to go to a man, and it might be weeks until you’re shoreside,” she says.
MedAire works to get more women trained as medical officers. And when there is a serious problem, they have procedures in place.
“If somebody calls us and there’s a medical complaint and a medical health issue, and through a quick assessment, we find that somebody is not safe to be on board, we will do something about that.”
In cases of sexual assault, it can be critical to have a woman in a senior role on board.
The culture around harassment and bullying may be changing but as of 2026, so are the regulations. STCW amendments, effective January 1, introduce new competencies that deal with bullying and harassment.
Morley was part of the group that helped develop the new regulations. “It’s one of the things I look back on and think I’m really proud of that effort,” he says.
Yachting-specific regulations and teaching must deal with the unique circumstances of life on yachts, namely the close quarters and potential for abuse and misuse that comes with that. Morley hears about the concerns at Maritime Professional Training.
“We get a lot of questions from parents, actually, looking at their kids going into the industry. One question that we get asked most is ‘will my kid be safe on board?’ That’s pretty telling.
“As a parent myself, I worry about that very thing. I can see that point very clearly now.”
Across the industry, more efforts are being made to directly address these issues. Maritime e-learning provider VIRSEC developed a course around the new amendments and guidance.
“The course that we’ve developed is a three-hour long course,” VIRSEC’s Sheldon Kaye says. “It’s really well structured. We’ve really tried to build the correct framework within the structure of this course. Everybody I’ve spoken to that understands why the training’s necessary has been remarkably positive. ‘It’s about time’ is the feedback we’ve been getting.”
VIRSEC has also fielded questions from the skeptical; Kaye heard from one woman in yachting who said female crew are already well aware of sexual harassment.
“We’re all aware of sexual harassment,” he says. “It’s about the protocols of what to do.” The course “opens your eyes, really, to what it’s about, not just what people already know.”
It also deals with maritime-specific issues, such as long stretches away from home, close living space and workplace hierarchy.
“There are so many factors that can affect people’s state of mind but also make them susceptible to situations,” he says. “There’s a naivety about this subject as well.”
But as flag states also send out guidelines and more companies come on board, Kaye believes yachting is shifting.
“It’s about making the change,” Kaye says, “and raising standards.”