Trivia: Sledding Injuries

• An article on the website of The Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh reports that approximately 45,000 sledding injuries are treated in US emergency rooms each year.

• An article entitled Winter Sports Safety provided by the University of Michigan Health System quotes a Consumer Product Safety Commission report identifying 74,000 sledding, snow tubing, and tobogganing-related injuries treated at hospital emergency rooms, doctors' offices, and clinics in 2004. Head injuries are common.

• According to an article from December 2006 on sledding safety published on the website of the Children's Hospital of St. Louis, one in 25 of those injured while sledding will require hospitalization.

• An article in the January 1999 issue of The American Journal of Emergency Medicine had a review of patients aged 18 and under admitted to a New Hampshire pediatric trauma center following a sledding accident between 1991 and 1997. Of the 25 patients identified, 21 were younger than 13 and 17 were males. The causes of injury were: collision with stationary object (15); sled-sled collision (1); child struck by sled (2); going off jump (3); foot caught under sled or on ground (3); fall off sled being towed by snowmobile (1). Injuries were: head (11); lower long bone/extremity (10); abdomen (5); chest (1); facial (1); spinal (1).

• A September 1999 article in Injury Prevention looked at patients visiting a pediatric emergency room in Ottawa, Ontario, and found 95 identified with sledding injuries. The mean age of those injured was 9.9 years (with the range being eight months to 17 years), with 63% of those injured being males, and 11% of those injured being admitted to hospital. Seventy percent of injuries occurred on non-designated sledding hills. The most common mechanisms of injury were collisions with objects (33%), falls in icy conditions (28%), and going off jumps (16%), but the most serious injuries resulted from contact with motor vehicles.

• Supervise kids when they are sledding.

• Check the hill in advance to look for obstacles in the sled's path, and make sure the hill doesn't end in a dangerous environment, such as a street, parking lot, stand of trees, thin ice, etc.

• Avoid sledding on icy surfaces, because ice increases the speed of the sled and reduces a rider's ability to control the sled.

• Children should wear fitted helmets.

• Sit facing forward – never go down a hill headfirst.

• If sledding at night, make sure you only go to a well lit area.

• When climbing back up the hill, go up the side, not in the path where others are sledding.

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