Amusement ride injury data in the United States

•Data on injuries involving amusement devices were extracted from a national database.•Inflatable slides and bounces are involved with a large share of amusement injuries.•Sampling weights have high impact on estimates from low-incidence amusement injury.•Exposure figures needed for deriving risk metrics are elusive.•Improvements to event detail capture and coding quality are needed.

Amusement ride injuries are generally understood to be infrequent, but are notable when they occur. Quantitative and qualitative assessment of amusement safety is in the public interest and important for continuous improvement. This paper reports on an analysis of the amusement injury data collected by the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) for 2010. Inflatable sides and bounces are involved with at least 42% of amusement injuries, 56% of injured patrons are aged 15 or under, and females sustain 57% of injuries treated, predominating at all ages above 5. Relative risks for user categories or device types cannot be computed, as exposure data is inadequate. The source data also largely lacks adequate information about the injury producing events and specific equipment involved, which interferes with development of strategic safety improvement priorities. Improvements are needed at the point of data collection either through the existing system or development of a new data collection mechanism, or both.