Though play is essential to the growth and development of children’s mind and body, serious accidents and injuries related to outdoor playground equipment have occurred. In order to provide a safe playground, it’s important to formulate the measures based on the actual conditions of the accidents related to playground equipment. The purpose of this study was to reveal the actual situation and factors of the play equipment-related accidents in the outdoor playground, and to discuss the measures for preventing accidents.
Between 2005 and 2009, 184 cases of the accidents and injuries of children from two to twelve years old related to playground equipment were reported from city parks, nurseries, kindergartens, and elementary schools across the country, and adventure playgrounds in Setagaya ward. The causes of the accidents were analyzed by extracting the accident types and four factors, which include physical hazard, physical risk, human hazard, and human risk. The differences according to location of playground were also analyzed.
The main findings were as follows;
1) Most common accidents were tumble and fall in 45.7％, and hit was in 12.5％.
2) Relationships of factors and playground types were analyzed by using Chi-square test. There was a significant relationship in presence of physical hazard(X
2(2)=37.3, p<0.001).
3) Accidents related to personal factors have occurred more than by physical factors in whole accidents related to playground equipment. The same trend was observed in falling accidents.
4) Relationships of four factors and frequencies of using adventure playgrounds were analyzed by using Chisquare test. Significant relevancies were shown in presence of personal hazard (X
2(1)=7.1, p<0.01) and personal risk(X
2(1)=6.1, p<0.05).
It is necessary to examine effective measures based on characteristics of each playground, and in addition to eliminating physical factors, active and various efforts to eliminate human factors are essential to secure safety in outdoor playgrounds. The construction of the unified database of equipment-related accident in outdoor playgrounds is needed in future.
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