Lack of caregiver supervision: a contributing factor in Australian unintentional child drowning deaths, 2000–2009

By contrast, the National Coroners Information System (NCIS) provides access to original documents for individual drowning cases. Details for South Australian child drownings in the NCIS database were very limited, although at no point in our article did we infer that this information is not collected in SA; rather we stated that that coroners findings were only available for 38.1% of cases in the NCIS, and that autopsy and toxicology reports are not routinely uploaded.1

Further, the recently revised position paper of the National Drowning Prevention Alliance (NDPA) states that neither a single device nor a single solution can prevent child drownings, and recommended that caregivers, aquatic facility owners, managers and operators use “layers of protection” to aid in child drowning prevention.2 We certainly agree that the ongoing promulgation of well researched public health campaigns is an important layer in the prevention of child drowning, although, to date, no published studies have investigated the effectiveness or rigorously evaluated Australian aquatic death prevention campaigns (such as Keep Watch, Kids Alive — Do The Five, SafeWaters and Play it Safe by the Water). However, the NDPA did identify that supervision is the one layer that should be ever-present, regardless of what other layers are used.2