Over 1 in 10 injured attendees received 'significant injury' at trampoline parks

Key takeaways:

• An Australian study found that 11% of injured trampoline park visitors experienced a significant injury.
• The rate of injury was 1.14 per 1,000 jumper hours.

About 11% of injured visitors to trampoline parks in Australia and the Middle East experienced a significant injury, according to findings from an Australian study published in Pediatrics.

“We’re really committed to reducing serious injury in children, so we're committed, therefore, to understanding how serious injury can be caused,” Warwick Teague, MBBS, DPhil, director of trauma service at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, told Healio.

Although trampoline parks are becoming a popular attraction for children and families that also promotes healthy activity, Teague said, serious injuries can occur at these centers.

“We were trying to grapple with that tension and provide good information that would allow us to have a balanced risk — not a risk which ignores the injury realities, but not a risk which is skewed by a proportion of injuries in a proportion of exposure, and we didn't have that information to fall back on,” Teague said.

Teague and colleagues contacted and collaborated with three leading trampoline park operators in their region and received itemized data on injured children, their age and gender, the activity being done at the time, and what kind of injury was involved at 18 parks. With each ticket being sold for an hour of trampoline park use, the rate of injury is expressed per 1,000 trampoline park use hours.

“This study is unique because it's the first time that exposure adjusted rates of injury have been ascertained through trampoline parks,” Teague said.

The researchers examined a total exposure of 8,387,178 jumper hours, during which 13,256 park users sustained an injury. Of these 13,256 injured jumpers, 11% sustained a significant injury, with injuries occurring at a rate of 1.14 injuries per 1,000 jumper hours (95% CI, 1-1.28).

Rates were highest for high-performance trampolines (2.11 per 1,000 jumper hours; 95% CI, 1.66-2.56) and inflatable bags or foam pits (1.91 per 1,000 jumper hours; 95% CI, 1.35-2.5).

“We started from the acknowledgement of a skewed and at times alarmist perspective that was suggesting to us that trampoline park injuries were common, and that they were on the rise,” Teague said. “But what we found — because we had a previously unavailable perspective of exposure adjusted injury rates — was that trampoline park injuries were uncommon, and significant injuries, by which we mean injuries that put a jumper into an ambulance, emergency room or operating room, were rare.”