A recent article published in Accident Analysis and Prevention explores how injuries and near-miss incidents that happen during led outdoor activities (such as hiking, rafting, orienteering, trekking, etc.) are reported to the New Zealand National Incident Database (NZ NID).
This article presents an analysis of 1014 incidents from the NZ NID. A version of Rasmussen’s Risk Management Framework was used to classify the contributing factors involved in each incident. The analysis identified contributing factors across all levels of the led outdoor activity system, demonstrating the framework’s applicability to the led outdoor activity injury domain.
In addition, some limitations were identified with the NZ NID data collection framework. The reports only include categories for contributing factors related to the immediate context of the activity (i.e. participants, instructors, equipment, and the environment). Identifying other factors requires manual coding of the description of the incident. This makes it difficult to quickly produce summaries across multiple incident reports. Moreover, only including categories related to participants, instructors, equipment, and the environment, may lead reporters to unduly focus on these contributing factors, while ignoring issues related to the management of outdoor activities, and other systemic issues.
This analysis informed the development of the prototype UPLOADS incident reporting system.
Thank you to the Mountain Safety Council for sharing the data collected through the NZ NID with the UPLOADS Research Team.
The full version of the article is available here.
Published source:
Salmon PM, Goode N, Lenné MG, Finch CF, Cassell E. (2014). Injury causation in the great outdoors: A systems analysis of led outdoor activity injury incidents. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 63, 111– 120.
The UPLOADS Project 