Changing the Landscape of Injury Prevention: Unlocking Geospatial Variables through Analysis of Lawn Mower Trauma

For a mechanism of injury inherently affected by terrain, such as lawn mower trauma, these variables should be examined to strengthen efforts to inform an injury prevention program. The American Association for the Surgery of Trauma Prevention Committee published a topical overview calling for a more effective integration of GIS software with existing trauma data, identifying a new horizon for injury research and the spatial dimensions of trauma.1 We hypothesized that a generalizable methodology to integrate trauma data and GIS could be created from a mechanism of injury inherently tied to local landforms, yielding novel insights for injury prevention programs. [...]in the regional population of lawn mower trauma patients, the mean slope of a rollover accident was 12.8 degrees, less than the upper limit of most current manufacturer recommendations of 15 degrees.4 Manufacturer safety recommendations may be inadequate or other geospatial variables may contribute to an increase in lawn mower rollover.