Before you can dive with any PADI-affiliated shop, you fill out a form: the Diver Medical Participant Questionnaire. Most divers skim it, tick "no" down the column, and hand it back in thirty seconds. If you're diving with a heart condition, that form is not a formality — it's the actual gate you need to understand before you book a course or a trip. This isn't medical advice. I'm not a physician. This is what the form asks, how the process works, and why I'm telling you as someone who has skin in this exact question.
What the Diver Medical Participant Questionnaire actually is
The RSTC/PADI Diver Medical form is a standardized questionnaire used across the recreational dive training industry, not just PADI. It's split into two parts:
- Part A — general health questions, yes/no. If you answer "no" to everything, you self-certify as fit to dive and no physician involvement is required.
- Part B — triggered by a "yes" anywhere in Part A. This section requires a physician's signature clearing you to dive, sometimes with restrictions noted.
Heart conditions sit squarely in the section that triggers Part B. Specific questions ask about heart disease, heart attacks, cardiac procedures (including stents), heart medications, chest pain, and irregular heart rhythms. A "yes" on any of these means you don't get to self-certify — you need a signature.
Who can actually sign it
This is the part people get wrong most often: it does not have to be a cardiologist. A general practitioner — your regular family doctor — can sign the form, provided they're comfortable making the assessment or willing to review your cardiac history and current status first. In practice, many GPs will want recent test results or a note from your cardiologist before they sign, which is reasonable, but the legal requirement is a licensed physician, not a specialist.
If your GP isn't comfortable signing without cardiology input, that's not the system failing you — that's exactly how it's supposed to work. Get the input, then get the signature.
What actually gets assessed
Diving puts specific demands on the cardiovascular system that don't come up in daily life: increased pressure, cold water triggering vasoconstriction, physical exertion against current, and the remote chance of needing to handle a stressful situation without immediate help. A physician assessing fitness to dive with a cardiac history is generally looking at exercise tolerance, rhythm stability, and whether your condition is being actively managed. "Managed" is doing a lot of work in that sentence — well-controlled and monitored is a different risk picture than undiagnosed or unstable.
Why you tell your instructor and your buddy anyway — even with a signed form
A signed medical form satisfies the training agency's liability requirement. It does not, on its own, make your dive buddy or your instructor aware that you're someone who needs to be watched for specific symptoms, or who needs a slower ascent, or who might need help fast if something feels wrong at depth.
Tell them. Not as a confession, just as operational information — the same way I'd want to know if someone on scene had a relevant medical history before things went sideways. A good divemaster will file that away and adjust nothing about how they treat you socially, but will absolutely adjust how closely they're watching you underwater. That's the entire point of telling them.
The one option that's actually a bad idea: concealing it
I'll say this plainly. Lying on the form, or telling the truth on the form but not mentioning anything to your buddy or instructor, is the one genuinely bad option here. Not because someone's going to catch you — nobody's checking your cardiac history at the dive shop counter. It's a bad idea because the entire safety system on a dive boat, the emergency O2, the action plan, the buddy check, all of it — depends on people around you having accurate information about you. Concealing a condition doesn't protect you from restriction. It just removes the information the people around you would need to actually help if something happened.
My own situation, briefly
I have coronary stents. They're fully occluded and I manage the condition with medication, under a physician's care. I'm saying that once, here, because this is the one article where it's actually relevant to the subject rather than a detail about me. I went through this exact process — GP conversation, documentation, honest disclosure — before I kept diving. I'm not a case study for what you should do. I'm a data point that the form and the process exist for a reason, and that going through it properly is entirely possible with a manageable cardiac history.
Practical steps if you're in this situation
- Get the actual RSTC/PADI Diver Medical Participant Questionnaire before you book anything, and read Part A yourself — don't rely on someone else's summary of what triggers Part B.
- Book time with your GP specifically to discuss diving fitness, and bring your cardiac history, current medications, and recent test results.
- If your GP wants specialist input, get it before your trip, not the week before — cardiology appointments aren't always fast to book.
- Carry a copy of your signed form and a basic summary of your condition and medications when you travel.
- Tell your instructor and your buddy before the first dive, not after a symptom shows up.
What this is not
This article is not medical advice, and it's not a substitute for a conversation with your own physician. Cardiac conditions vary enormously in severity and stability, and only someone with your actual chart can tell you whether diving is appropriate for you specifically. What I can tell you, from having gone through the process myself, is that the form exists to get you a real answer, not to keep you out of the water by default. Go through it honestly, and let the people who are actually responsible for your safety in the water know what they're working with.