DIVING

2. Dive Injuries
2.2 Dive Injuries - Emergency Department Admissions
Peter Buzzacott
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) maintains a National Electronic Injury Surveillance System
(NEISS) that includes 100 Emergency Departments (ED) in the US and US Territories. Originally, only injuries associated
with consumer products were entered into the database but since 2000, patient information has been collected for all
emergency department presentations involving injuries. Each emergency department is awarded a statistical weighting
and, from these weightings, an estimate of the total number of similar injuries nationwide can be made, with 95% confidence
intervals. The data are publicly available here: http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Research--Statistics/NEISS-Injury-Data/
The NEISS data is used each-year by the National Safety Council to produce their annual statistical report on unintentional
injuries, called Injury Facts. In this report, a comparison can be made between sports and recreational pursuits as
shown in Table 2.2-1. Cells shaded in peach indicate the age-group with the highest percentage of emergency department
admissions and cells shaded in yellow indicate the second highest percentage age-group of participants presenting
at emergency departments. The number of participants in the US and territories is not known for each pursuit, nor
is the number of times each participant engages in that pursuit per-year. Therefore, we cannot conclude from this table
which sport has the highest or lowest risk of injury. What can be seen in this table, however, is firstly that scuba injuries
account for far fewer hospitalizations each-year than any of the other sports or recreations in this table and secondly,
that the sports with the highest percentage of participants under 25 years of age are team sports. This is, of course,
heavily influenced by the fact they are sports played in schools. However, as the age distribution shifts towards older
participants, and the proportion of participants under 25 years presenting at the emergency department falls, (as shown
by the shift in colored cells to the right, and by the falling percentage in the last column), then scuba injuries share a
similar age distribution as bowling, tennis and fishing. As stated above, that does not imply these recreations share the
same levels of risk.
Table 2.2-1 Comparison between emergency department presentations for selected sports and recreations 2010-2013, overall count and
percentage by age-groups
NEISS 2010-13 Total % % % % %
Sport n