CONCLUSION
most severe half). The marked difference in ratios of males (0.91) and females (1.61) indicates that females are more often involved in non-fatal drowning incidents than they are in fatal incidents, while for males the opposite is true. Hence, including non-fatal drowning data as part of the total drowning toll is particularly important for assessing the impact of drowning on females.
With approximately 200 million beach visitations annually, Australian beaches are undeniably popular. While safety is a consideration for most people when picking a beach to recreate at, over half (57%) will consider a coastal swimming location outside patrolled locations or patrol hours. Swimming on the coast is not perceived to be a dangerous activity, however it is the activity that accounts for most coastal drowning deaths. Part of the problem is that almost two-thirds of Australians (61%) report that they cannot swim 50m in the ocean without stopping.
The fatal to non-fatal ratio decreases with increasing age, indicating that when older individuals get into trouble it is more likely to end in a fatality compared to younger people. While the male ratio is stable over the study period, the female ratio seems to be increasing over time. This is driven by the increase in female non-fatal incidents.
On average, there are 47 drowning deaths on beaches annually. Most of these were adult Australian residents. Almost two-thirds (60%) happened while swimming, usually in the afternoon. Rips and medical events played a role in 37% and 24% of drowning deaths respectively. SLSA recognises that fatal drowning alone does not reflect the total burden of drowning. Non-fatal drowning incidents are harder to quantify but represent a significant part of the total impact of drowning. This is the first report that has attempted to quantify the total drowning toll on Australian beaches. Between 2002 and 2015 504 non-fatal drowning incidents were recorded, averaging 39 incidents annually. Males represent 77% of these on average but the ratio of females to males is increasing over time, with females representing 17% of non-fatal drowning incidents in 2002-03 and 2003-04, and 33% in 2014-15. The non-fatal data was sourced from hospitalisation incidents, automatically filtering out the less severe cases of non-fatal drowning. It was also filtered by hospital coding, restricting the dataset to cases within a much narrower definition of drowning than SLSA uses. A direct comparison of the fatal and non-fatal datasets required revising the fatal dataset to the narrower definition of the non-fatal data.
By combining the fatal and non-fatal datasets we have moved toward understanding the total drowning toll in Australian beaches. It is worth noting that, although this analysis allows us to quantify the scale and trends in non-fatal drowning incidents, it does not include the severity nor consider the social impact of these events. These are considerations for further research into the total drowning toll.
The fatal to non-fatal rate of 1.08 indicates that fatal drowning incidents account for half of the total drowning toll (albeit the
SURF LIFE SAVING AUSTR ALIA
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COASTAL SAFET Y BRIEF – BEACHES