Exploring the burden of fatal drowning and data characteristics in three high income countries: Australia, Canada and New Zealand

Drowning is a leading and preventable cause of death that has suffered an attention deficit. Improving drowning data in countries would assist the understanding of the full extent and circumstances of drowning, to target interventions and evaluate their effectiveness. The World Health Organization identifies data collection as a key strategy underpinning effective interventions. This study compares unintentional fatal drowning data collection, management and comparison using the databases of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Cases of fatal unintentional drowning between 1-January-2005 and 31-December-2014 were extracted. Cases were combined into a single dataset and univariate and chi square analysis (p