Panagiota Papageorgiou, George Mavromatis and George Kosta
Democritus University of Thrace
Abstract
The purpose of this study was the description of injuries sustained by campers at summer camps, aged 7-15 years. A sample of 8 camps from the Creek camp population participated in this injury surveillance study. Doctors and camp directors completed reports detailing the number of events sustained and provided specific information about each event. During the period of the study, 726 injury reports completed. A total of 427 (58.8%) males and 299 (41.2%) females reported having an injury. The leading causes of injury in children’s were: falls, slips, crushed by object, hit/bitten and fall of stable extent. The parts of body most often affected were the knee, head, ankle and wrist/hand. The most frequent activities of injuries were sports, free play and walking in camp yard. Data collected via such systems can be used to calculate injury rates, to describe patterns of injury and to identify risk factors for camper – related injury. All this provide the data needed to develop prevention interventions to decrease the number of youth whose camp experiences are negatively affected by injury.
Keywords:
injuries, children, summer camp
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