2008–2017 Emergency Department-Treated Ice Hockey Injury Estimates

Abstract

This Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) report presents annual estimates of the number of emergency department-treated, ice hockey-related injuries in the United States in a ten-year period from 2008 through 2017. These estimates are based on CPSC's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) data, where sampling weights are used to project the cases from NEISS hospitals to national estimates. The advantages of using NEISS data include the ability to determine the estimated number of injuries and the percentage distribution for the most common injury types, the month of the year in which they occurred, the most common injury locations, gender, the most common injuries by gender, age groups (younger than 15 years old, 15 to 18 years old, older than 18 years old), and hospital disposition, provided in the form of tables and figures. However, since the scope of NEISS data is limited to emergency department (ED)-treated injuries, the data alone should not be used to estimate all ice hockey injuries or determine the risk of injury due to the lack of a sample population denominator. The main objective of this report is to review ice hockey-related injury types with respect to age group and identify any statistically significant linear trends based on the estimated annual number of ED-treated injuries since the Fifth International Symposium on Safety in Ice Hockey held May 4–5, 2008. A secondary objective involving specific review of incidents in the United States from January 1, 2008, to March 9, 2018, based on detailed reports in CPSC's Consumer Product Safety Risk Management System (CPSRMS), supplements the primary section on injury estimates. The purpose of this review is to investigate the hockey equipment involved with a particular injury type. This report includes a section summarizing key findings based on the results, as well as an appendix to explain the methodology for the data collection.