Public holidays, school holidays, and long weekends: Effects on drowning rates in New South Wales

To quantify drowning rates and fatal to non-fatal drowning ratios on public holidays, school holidays, weekdays and long weekends in New South Wales from January 2010 to June 2022.

Using a linked administrative dataset comprising ambulance (paper-based and electronic records), emergency department presentations and death registry, rates of drowning and ratios of fatal to non-fatal drowning were calculated.

Across 4,161 total drowning incidents, public holidays (14.21 incidents/100,000 person-years) and weekends (6.77 incidents/100,000 person-years) had higher population-normalised incident rates than regular weekdays (3.18 incidents/100,000 person-years). School holidays (8.58 incidents/100,000 person-years) recorded higher rates than non-school holiday days (3.46 incidents/100,000 person-years). New Year's Day and Australia Day accounted for 4.7% of all incidents (n=197 incidents). Drowning during school holidays was higher than non-school holiday days across all seasons, aside from winter school holidays.

Drowning risk is higher on days typically associated with greater leisure time. This study adds to the growing literature identifying temporal variation in drowning risk and is the first to use linked data.

Those tasked with supervising aquatic locations and the provision of water safety messaging should consider the targeted strategies for holidays and weekends such as extended patrols and media-based risk communication.