Advertisement

Which sport will land you in hospital?

Putting your body on the line is an Australian sporting tradition.

But it was responsible for more than 36,000 hospital cases in one year, a study has shown.

Australian football was the leading cause of sports-related hospitalisations, accounting for 3,186 cases, while soccer and cycling rounded out the top three in the 2011-12 financial year.

Click on the owl to see the full list. 

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare spokesman professor James Harrison said the AIHW study found Australian Rules led the pack with around 18 hospitalisations per 100,000 people.

“It’s a combination of two things; one is that quite a lot of people play it,” Harrison told AAP.

“The other is, per player, it’s got a fairly high risk of injury.”

But despite the romanticism of Australians battling it out on the sporting field, most sporting injuries occur from falling over.

A third of hospital cases were as a result of a fall while “transport accidents”, most commonly associated with motor sport, accounted for another 20 per cent of the injuries.

Only around one in 10 people got hurt from banging bodies with a competitor.

But Professor Harrison said many falls were influenced by the competitive nature of sporting competitions, with many trips and slips being categorised as falls .

“There are falls in the flurry of play were someone might get tripped,” Harrison said.

“I think a lot of the cases that wound up being coded as falls would have been a consequence of the way the various games are played.”

Australians spent a total of 79,000 days in hospital in 2011-12 courtesy of sporting injuries.

The study also showed clear demographic trends with more than three-quarters of hospital admissions from sport being men while around two-thirds were aged under 35.

The leading cause of injuries in all sports but two – netball and fishing – was a bone fracture while the knee and lower leg were the areas most affected.

AAP

 

Advertisement
Stay informed, daily
A FREE subscription to The New Daily arrives every morning and evening.
The New Daily is a trusted source of national news and information and is provided free for all Australians. Read our editorial charter.
Copyright © 2025 The New Daily.
All rights reserved.