UKH

The recovery document quotes accident rates per million hours and is manipulated to give a positive picture of mountaineering (as to be expected). Whilst I agree that mountaineering is much safer than its public perception, I think the metric used is flawed. 

Is there a more representative figure to use, something like "accident impact"? 

Consider this (the figures are all estimates, not underpinned). 

A broken ankle requires a total of 24hrs of treatment; xray, cast, aftercare. This is a constant, whatever the sport.

Evacuation from a football field requires 2hrs, 2 para medics, 1 hr each. 

Evacuation from a crag, 26 hrs, 8xMRT, 3 hrs each, plus the above. 

So football 26hrs vs climbing 50 hrs.

The impact of the climbing injury is twice the impact of the footballing injury. 

As stated above, my figures are estimated, not underpinned. Please argue the concept rather than the numbers. 

Having bust a few bits over the years doing both motocross and climbing my experience is using rescue/ambulance statistics as a measure of accidents is meaningless. Go to A&E on a Saturday afternoon and look at how many walk/ hobble in.

Total times i have ended up in hospital from various things:

Playing Rugby - 3

Running - 1

Jumping over a fence at school - 1

Climbing a tree as a kid - 1

Rock climbing and mountaineering - 0

Tripping over at the bottom of a crag and landing awkwardly across a rock, which didn't break my leg but did cause DVT, which is as painful as a broken bone - 1

Cycling into a bridge parapet[1] and breaking my little finger, which caused me to go into nasty shock and end up in an ambulance (this provides people a good laugh ) - 1

Edit: Oh, when I was a kid, fell down Ski Llandudno's slope and sprained my wrist (Dad told me to man up, Mum took me to hospital) - 1

That's it I think.  I generally bounce fairly well, and am quite risk averse climbing anyway, I don't like bold stuff.

If you count things that didn't go to hospital but maybe should have done, cycling has done a few more, and a fall from the top of an obstacle on an OCR that I was very lucky didn't either wipe me out completely or put me in a wheelchair.

Climbing - nowt other than overuse injuries and a minor twisted ankle from falling awkwardly when bouldering, all of which fix themselves with a few weeks off.

[1] If you've ever cycled over the Iron Trunk Aqueduct near Wolverton you'll know how this happened - it's very narrow with an awkward shuffle to the side at the start and the risk of falling in the canal on the other side.  Having noticed my centre of gravity on a bike is well above the railing (so it could have been a lot worse) I now get off and push across.

In 30 years I've had to go to A+E once for climbing (and I climb a lot) and that was a sport climbing accident.  

I've had numerous injuries requiring medical intervention for football over the same period. I can also categorically say that football has caused significantly more significant injuries requiring long spells of medical intervention amongst people I know (and I know roughly a similar number of climbers and footballers).

I rate my risk of injury at the crag to be less than my risk of injury getting there and back.

A cursory glance at MRT records indicates that the bread and butter for them are inexperienced and unfit walkers - slips and falls on the ground and sudden illness, not climbing.

So I'd say my experience fully backs up the BMC accident rates.

If you include the walk in (which is the only thing that's ever required medical attention for me in relation to climbing) I'd be inclined to agree.  If I cycled there even more so.  Driving...possibly about the same, I wouldn't expect a serious injury with either (I'm a very defensive driver as well) but it is a possibility.

Even if the accident impact for mountaineering/climbing per unit time is much higher than that for, say, amateur football the total "accident impact" will be far less IF far less people participate (and overall spend far less hours doing so).

A few points in response:

Anecdata is not the plural of anecdote. 

I could quote my rugby and football injuries to defend those sports (haven't played either since school and often bunked pe) 

I am questioning the data used, not climbing so try not to be so defensive. After all we are happy to use the rufty tufty risk taker image when it suits. 

I wonder if climbing would attract the same numbers/quality of participants if the bmc figures were widely known. I can't see the rad dudes at red bull sponsoring the safest sport in the world. 

Rugby players call footballers soft, what should footballers call climbers? 

I get what you're trying to argue, but I don't think the data are rich enough to draw any meaningful conclusion from.  Whilst you might well be right that the man-hours for this climbing accident are about double those for the same accident happening on a football field, we don't have any figures for how bad the typical accidents are.  Maybe most football injuries are ones where a single mate can help you hobble to A&E, whilst most mountaineering injuries need the full MRT evac?  Or maybe lots of mountaineering injuries self-rescue to the roadside?  Without this sort of complexity we're really just guessing.

Another thought: maybe what we need to measure is number of people exposed, not the total time they are exposed for?  If you've just infected a member of the MRT, it hardly matters if they go on to carry you for ten minutes or five hours.  So using your numbers, climbing turns out to be five times as bad as football.

(I appreciate that longer contact time probably means more likely transmisson, but after a certain amount of contact that's got to tail off, hasn't it?)

I'm not surprised that the BMC has set the figures out in a way that makes the case for mountaineering activities as strongly as possible!  I'd be kind of disappointed if they didn't.

Normally a valid and important point to make but somewhat undermined by the fact that your own numbers were entirely made up.

It's perfectly fair to exclude anecdotes in favour of proper data, but I think anecdotes are a balanced response to your own speculation.

Adopting your thinking and my anecdotes, football and rugby are perfectly safe. 

I think the nature of MR in this country also needs to be factored in here. The extra impact you propose for climbing incidents comes from willing volunteers, funded by charity, with no impact on the general public purse or NHS resources*. That doesn't mean we should be blasé about it but ultimately MR teams exist because they value outdoor activities themselves and want to support people's ability to do them.

For that reason, the thoughts of MR will be critical when it comes to getting back to our activities. If they advise against climbing, that carries great weight. Similarly, if they say they're willing and able to provide more cover again but ask people to take it easy, I'm sure most people would listen and comply.

*Except in the overlap between MR members and NHS staff, which I believe was part of the reason why MR scaled back their response levels in this crisis and advised against getting out.

Sir or Ma'am.

😉

I agree, the bmc put forward a strong case on all of our behalf, as expected. The paper and the data within will be open to challenge, presenting mountaineering as the safest sport there is will be rightly challenged.

Another skew in the data is the time spent participating. Foot ball 100 ish hospitalizations per million hours at 90mins per game. Climbing 40 ish, a typical summer after work quick hit 3hrs? Climbing starts to catch up with foot ball. When this is considered. 

I scrutinise tech papers for a living so I have to be picky. I am not anti bmc or anti climber in this. The data is cherry picked to make climbing look good and this is quite obvious to anyone scrutinising the paper. It may weaken the case. 

Getting back to the accident impact idea, you can't ignore the fact that you are less likely to have an accident climbing than playing football, therefore the total burden on the NHS is lower (pro-rata) for a Saturday climbing v. a Saturday playing football

I don't think they were trying to argue that climbing is incredibly safe, just presenting a small amount of data to reduce the chance of lazy assumptions that it's incredibly dangerous. It doesn't really matter exactly where climbing sits in a precise hierarchy of risk, as long as decision makers and media commentators realise that it's not an inherently reckless endeavour that needs to be treated as if it's orders of magnitude more risky than other activities.

Excellent point sir, in particular re media commentary.

I can see it now, The Sun, Express etc. with their usual wild headlines...."Reckless dare devil lunatics free solo sheer rock face clinging to it by their fingernails using tiny metal pins to prevent their death risking NHS to get their thrills"

When in reality is was some people multi pitching a VDiff, Middlefell Buttress with a walk off the top. 

Just to put the other side, my hospital visits from my various sports over the years:

Football: 0

Running: 0 (though I could do with a new knee!)

Cycling/Mountain Biking: 0

Squash: 1 (walked into A&E for a bit of stitching)

Climbing: 1 - but it was for a three week stay and getting me there (from Rivelin, so not exactly remote) involved at various points 2 fire engines, 2 police cars, 1 helicopter (unused), 1 ambulance and Edale MRT (who saved my life).

And at the weirder end, my hospitalisation history;

Climbing/mountaineering/walking = 0

Tearing eyeball with a rebounding drumstick ended up five hours sitting in a rammed A&E then a quick ten-minute stitch back together = 1

Some more detail re: risk here. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45198321_Evaluation_of_Injury_and_...

I see the point of an overall impact on services but hard to generalise

Interestingly, the majority of red bull's sponsored climbers are actually competition climbers. Some have a few high profile outdoor achievements on their CVs, but the scope is surprisingly limited and only 2 on the current list appear to have done anything that meets red bull's adrenaline sport image (Stefan Glowacz and Sasha di Guilian).