Playground equipment-Forget the latest hysteria, statistics show playgrounds are safe
Playground equipment-Forget the latest hysteria, statistics show playgrounds are safe
Get ready for something else to worry about. This week, CBC News warned us that “more than 28,000 children are injured every year on playgrounds across Canada,” and that “the rate of hospitalizations has gone up by 8% between 2007 and 2012.” That sounds like a lot (more on that in a minute). What might we be able to do about it?
The answers from CBC’s expert safety sources are as predictable as the sunrise: Better and more rigorously applied standards, and more obsessive parenting.
Not only are the Canadian Standards Association’s guidelines for safe playgrounds voluntary, one safety advocate fretted, but when those standards are updated, we often forget to send in wrecking crews to obliterate playgrounds that fall short.
And listen up, parents: “Supervision in this type of activity means eyes on the child, being in arm’s length and not being halfway across the yard on your cellphone having coffee with a friend,” Debbie Friedman of the Montreal Children’s Hospital told CBC.
Yikes. I would describe my parents as “average” on the watchfulness scale, and yet I distinctly remember clambering around on backyard jungle gyms without a single parental eye on me. I was even known sometimes to climb a medium-sized tree. By modern standards, if the news is to be believed, it was as if I grew up barefoot and homeless along the untamed banks of the Mississippi.
The CBC story did, at least, offer a voice suggesting we not go overboard. “Where are the kids playing if there isn’t a playground?” asked Pamela Fuselli of Parachute, an injury prevention organization. “Are they in the street, are they doing more unsafe behaviours or activities?”
But CBC treats those as rhetorical or unanswerable questions, which they are not. And the story has other problems too. In the TV version, reporter Cameron MacIntosh explains that according to the safety boffins, the rise in injury numbers is “likely due to better reporting numbers in [emergency rooms].” This was perhaps not very effectively conveyed by the headline on the CBC’s website: “Playground equipment involved in rising number of injuries.”
It’s also a mystery where the 28,000 injuries per year figure comes from. In 2008, the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP), which includes four general and 11 pediatric hospitals, reported just 3,960 playground-related injuries. That’s not a complete sample — but can there really have been seven times more? And 28,000 bears no relation to the 8% rise in hospitalizations mentioned in the same sentence, which was from 1,524 in 2007 to 1,654 in 2011. Those data come from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).
A chart in the print version did make clear that pediatric hospitalizations for playground-related injuries plummeted from 1994 to 2006. But aside from that, viewers and readers were left with no means to determine just how worried they should be about this.
I’ll take a crack. First of all, the CHIRPP data tells us a lot about the types of playground injuries parents might reasonably prepare for: At the extreme end of the 3,960 reported injuries in 2008 were two amputated fingers and 1,853 fractures — 1,440 to the upper body, 381 to the lower body, 19 to the face or skull, and 13 to the spine or ribs. None of that is any fun, but only a tiny fraction of these would be life-changing events.
What parents are most afraid of, presumably, are major injuries, which CIHI tracks in its National Trauma Registry. (“Major injury” is a relative term defined, somewhat circularly, such that 10% of injuries so classified are expected to be fatal.)
For 2010, the CIHI database of major injury hospitalizations contains 1,918 patients under the age of 20. Of those injuries, 387 (20%) were caused by falls. And of those 387 falls, just 12 (3%) involved playground equipment. More menacing circumstances included skating (4%), “slipping, tripping and stumbling” (5%), negotiating stairs (10%) and roller-skating, rollerblading and skateboarding (13%). So playgrounds aren’t a significant source of major injuries even from falls. And overall, we’re talking about something like 0.6% of major childhood injuries.
Is that worth worrying about? It’s hardly for me to say. But here are some comparisons: Whereas playground falls account for 0.6% of major childhood injuries recorded by CIHI in 2010, at minimum 1.4% involved burns, 4.4% involved pedestrian-versus-motor vehicle confrontations, 7% involved bicycles, 17% involved assaults or being “struck by or against objects and persons,” and 37% involved driving or riding in motor vehicles — perhaps on the way to activities considered very safe.
If you’re inclined to worry about this sort of thing, that playground in the backyard or just down the street starts to look pretty good, doesn’t it?
Get ready for something else to worry about. This week, CBC News warned us that “more than 28,000 children are injured every year on playgrounds across Canada,” and that “the rate of hospitalizations has gone up by 8% between 2007 and 2012.” That sounds like a lot (more on that in a minute). What might we be able to do about it?
The answers from CBC’s expert safety sources are as predictable as the sunrise: Better and more rigorously applied standards, and more obsessive parenting.
Not only are the Canadian Standards Association’s guidelines for safe playgrounds voluntary, one safety advocate fretted, but when those standards are updated, we often forget to send in wrecking crews to obliterate playgrounds that fall short.
And listen up, parents: “Supervision in this type of activity means eyes on the child, being in arm’s length and not being halfway across the yard on your cellphone having coffee with a friend,” Debbie Friedman of the Montreal Children’s Hospital told CBC.
Yikes. I would describe my parents as “average” on the watchfulness scale, and yet I distinctly remember clambering around on backyard jungle gyms without a single parental eye on me. I was even known sometimes to climb a medium-sized tree. By modern standards, if the news is to be believed, it was as if I grew up barefoot and homeless along the untamed banks of the Mississippi.
The CBC story did, at least, offer a voice suggesting we not go overboard. “Where are the kids playing if there isn’t a playground?” asked Pamela Fuselli of Parachute, an injury prevention organization. “Are they in the street, are they doing more unsafe behaviours or activities?”
But CBC treats those as rhetorical or unanswerable questions, which they are not. And the story has other problems too. In the TV version, reporter Cameron MacIntosh explains that according to the safety boffins, the rise in injury numbers is “likely due to better reporting numbers in [emergency rooms].” This was perhaps not very effectively conveyed by the headline on the CBC’s website: “Playground equipment involved in rising number of injuries.”
It’s also a mystery where the 28,000 injuries per year figure comes from. In 2008, the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP), which includes four general and 11 pediatric hospitals, reported just 3,960 playground-related injuries. That’s not a complete sample — but can there really have been seven times more? And 28,000 bears no relation to the 8% rise in hospitalizations mentioned in the same sentence, which was from 1,524 in 2007 to 1,654 in 2011. Those data come from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).
A chart in the print version did make clear that pediatric hospitalizations for playground-related injuries plummeted from 1994 to 2006. But aside from that, viewers and readers were left with no means to determine just how worried they should be about this.
I’ll take a crack. First of all, the CHIRPP data tells us a lot about the types of playground injuries parents might reasonably prepare for: At the extreme end of the 3,960 reported injuries in 2008 were two amputated fingers and 1,853 fractures — 1,440 to the upper body, 381 to the lower body, 19 to the face or skull, and 13 to the spine or ribs. None of that is any fun, but only a tiny fraction of these would be life-changing events.
What parents are most afraid of, presumably, are major injuries, which CIHI tracks in its National Trauma Registry. (“Major injury” is a relative term defined, somewhat circularly, such that 10% of injuries so classified are expected to be fatal.)
For 2010, the CIHI database of major injury hospitalizations contains 1,918 patients under the age of 20. Of those injuries, 387 (20%) were caused by falls. And of those 387 falls, just 12 (3%) involved playground equipment. More menacing circumstances included skating (4%), “slipping, tripping and stumbling” (5%), negotiating stairs (10%) and roller-skating, rollerblading and skateboarding (13%). So playgrounds aren’t a significant source of major injuries even from falls. And overall, we’re talking about something like 0.6% of major childhood injuries.
Is that worth worrying about? It’s hardly for me to say. But here are some comparisons: Whereas playground falls account for 0.6% of major childhood injuries recorded by CIHI in 2010, at minimum 1.4% involved burns, 4.4% involved pedestrian-versus-motor vehicle confrontations, 7% involved bicycles, 17% involved assaults or being “struck by or against objects and persons,” and 37% involved driving or riding in motor vehicles — perhaps on the way to activities considered very safe.
If you’re inclined to worry about this sort of thing, that playground in the backyard or just down the street starts to look pretty good, doesn’t it?
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