Basejumper.com - archive

https://www.wemjournal.org/...(19)30044-4/fulltext
(behind paywall)

Forrester, et. al., of Stanford University Department of Surgery, reviewed emergency department records relating to BASE jumping injuries in the United States between 2010-2014. They tried to determine statistics about the people who were injured, about the patterns of injury and treatment, and about costs of the initial hospital visit.

Takeaways:
If you make it to the hospital, you'll almost certainly survive (doesn't mean you'll like it, though).
55% of visits involved multiple body regions and 38% were isolated extremity injuries.
About 9 in 10 ED visits were discharged home without admission.
A small percentage of ED visits were discharged directly to rehab or other care facility.
If you do get admitted, it's usually only for one day.
The most common reasons for admission involved orthopedic procedures, particularly tib-fib surgery.
For those discharged from the ED, the average costs were about $1,600 per visit.*
For those discharged after admission, the average costs were about $58,300 per admission.*
Working backwards from the number of BASE-related hospital visits, and an estimated rate of injury**, the authors estimate that 895,000 BASE jumps were made in the US between 2010-1014. That's 179,000 jumps per year. For comparison, USPA estimates 3.1 million skydives per year during the same time period, in the U.S.

*That's just the costs for the initial visit to the hospital. It doesn't include outpatient followup, subsequent surgeries, or long term rehab which can be enormously expensive.
**Estimated rate of injury requiring seeking medical care of 2 per 1000 from a 2012 survey published in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine. Seeking medical care and showing up to the ED are different things, though.

Other thoughts:
The database they used certainly doesn't capture 100% of all BASE-related hospital visits.
The data set doesn't let them tease apart injury events by type of object, slider, or if using tracking suits or wingsuits.
"Multiple body regions" is not clearly defined. If you injure both legs, is that one region ("Legs"), or two?
I calculated the average costs from the numbers they provided in table 1, but it would be nice if there were a way to see median costs, too.
The calculated costs are not, in any rational way, related to the number you pay the hospital.
The datset is several years old by now.
Who knew, there was an ICD code for BASE-related injury?
Are any of these authors jumpers/skydivers?

Despite those limitations & concerns, it seemed like a very reasonable paper considering how hard it is to collect good data. For the most part it stays in its lane, and it avoids the worst "whuffo" assumptions.

I did actually.

There's also an ICD code for injuries sustained in the bathroom of a mobile home, and being sucked into a jet engine (subsequent encounter).

https://www.healthcaredive.com/...icd-10-codes/285737/

Curious about how the author(s) came up with this number. Not saying it isn't true, but that's about 500 americano basejumps every day, all year round. That sounds like a lot to me. I don't know if it close or not, just that it sounds like a lot. It interests me, would be fun to know who and how this number was decided on.

Kerkko
BASE1184

I have a few friends that definitely broke their tib-fib while 'hiking or something else' non base related.. I wonder how many others claim different causes than BASE for non-life threatening injuries..

Number of incidents, divided by estimated incident rate. i.e. 1790 incidents divided by (2/1000). It's a reasonable strategy, if your underlying data is accurate (which it's not).

The 1790 is likely an underestimate, as epibase testifies. 2/1000 is based off an old survey, and to my knowledge, has not been reproduced independently. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. Also, don't trust any number that comes without an error range.

Edit to add: I wonder how many jumps are done at just the Perrine Bridge, on an average day or an average year? Anyone know?

Best estimate for today:

3 groups, 6 jumpers each. Each group made 4 or 5 loads. 18 jumpers, average 5 jumps each, means on the high side there were 90 jumps made from the bridge today.

There was one other solo jumper, but I think he only made one jump. Might have been a couple more.

Let's say that today the total was probably between 75 and 100.

If we say today was "average" (weekday, but high season), that would make the total from the bridge max out somewhere around 36,500 jumps in a year. I think that's a really high estimate, because of the number of winter days I've seen with less than ten jumps total. I'd guess the real number is closer to 20,000 in a year, but I'm still just making a slightly more educated WAG there.

Like Kerkko, I'd have a lot of trouble believing 500 jumps every day, all year.

Thanks Colm. Just on a side note regarding those horrendous costs, ANYONE injured in New Zealand has their costs covered by our ACC (Accident Compensation Corporation). This is a government department. They get their funding from employers. All employers pay ACC levies, per worker. You don't have to be employed to be covered by ACC.

It doesn't matter if you were injured doing something legal or illegal and they cover visitors to NZ too. There is also no blame layed on anyone, as far as costs go. Helicopter rides are covered too as long as you called the ambulance service. They summon the chopper.

Interestingly, if any NZ citizen is injured in Straya, we are covered there too, but not by ACC. The two countries have a reciprocal arrangement for accidents, but you must go to a public hospital and in Straya you must pay for ambulance rides. I don't know about their chopper rides.

ACC website:
https://www.acc.co.nz/...l=content-after-navs

Wikipedia about ACC:
https://www.google.com/...D1DPZ5fVvRFTZvFshwd5

i wonder if there is a swiss ICD code for wingsuiters that choose the ramp at HU for their intro to ws base.


for sure numbers are skewed by savvy jumpers not advertising their activities.. but i'd bet this is the more seasoned portion of our group and a smaller percentage of total injuries.

I'm sure ICD-11 will include it.

And ICD is worldwide. I'm not sure if nationality is included in the coding, but it probably will be eventually.

Hilarious book illustrating ICD codes: https://www.icd10illustrated.com/index.html

I'm very impressed that there are staffers at the WHO whose job is just to sit around thinking of different possible causes of injury and writing codes for them. They'll probably get around to "poor choice of exit point for wing suiting, subsequent encounter" soon enough.