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Original article
Hospital-treated injuries from horse riding in Victoria, Australia: time to refocus on injury prevention?
  1. Siobhán O’Connor1,
  2. Peta L Hitchens2,
  3. Lauren V Fortington3
  1. 1 School of Health and Human Performance, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
  2. 2 Equine Centre, Melbourne Veterinary School, Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  3. 3 Australian Centre for Research into Injury in Sport and its Prevention, Federation University Australia, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Dr Lauren V Fortington; l.fortington{at}federation.edu.au

Abstract

Background The most recent report on hospital-treated horse-riding injuries in Victoria was published 20 years ago. Since then, injury countermeasures and new technology have aimed to make horse riding safer for participants. This study provides an update of horse-riding injuries that required hospital treatment in Victoria and examines changes in injury patterns compared with the earlier study.

Methods Horse-riding injuries that required hospital treatment (hospital admission (HA) or emergency department (ED) presentations) were extracted from routinely collected data from public and private hospitals in Victoria from 2002–2003 to 2015–2016. Injury incidence rates per 100 000 Victorian population per financial year and age-stratified and sex-stratified injury incidence rates are presented. Poisson regression was used to examine trends in injury rates over the study period.

Results ED presentation and HA rates were 31.1 and 6.6 per 100 000 person-years, increasing by 28.8% and 47.6% from 2002 to 2016, respectively. Female riders (47.3 ED and 10.1 HA per 100 000 person-years) and those aged between 10 and 14 years (87.8 ED and 15.7 HA per 100 000 person-years) had the highest incidence rates. Fractures (ED 29.4%; HA 56.5%) and head injuries (ED 15.4%; HA 18.9%) were the most common injuries. HA had a mean stay of 2.6±4.1 days, and the mean cost per HA was $A5096±8345.

Conclusion Horse-riding injuries have remained similar in their pattern (eg, types of injuries) since last reported in Victoria. HA and ED incidence rates have increased over the last 14 years. Refocusing on injury prevention countermeasures is recommended along with a clear plan for implementation and evaluation of their effectiveness in reducing injury.

  • equestrian
  • epidemiology
  • injuries

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsem-2017-000321

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors SOC and LVF conceived the study. SOC completed the data analysis. SOC and LVF wrote the first draft of the manuscript, and all authors critically reviewed the work before approving the final version of the manuscript. All authors will act as study guarantors for this paper.

    • Funding This paper was funded by the Irish Research Council New Foundations scheme. ACRISP is one of the international research centres for the prevention of injury and protection of athlete health supported by the IOC. PLH is supported by funding from Racing Victoria (RVL), the Victorian Racing Industry Fund (VRIF) of the Victorian State Government, and the University of Melbourne.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Ethics approval Ethical approval was obtained from the Federation University Australia Human Research Ethics Committee (C17-020).

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.