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Record W4411455966 · doi:10.1136/ip-2025-045690

Lay rescuer intervention in fatal drownings in Canada, 2010–2019: a population-based cross-sectional analysis

2025· article· en· W4411455966 on OpenAlexaffabout
Cody Dunne, Tessa Clemens, Michael Rotondi, Hala Tamim, Alison Macpherson

Bibliographic record

VenueInjury Prevention · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicInjury Epidemiology and Prevention
Canadian institutionsYork UniversityCommunications Research Centre CanadaUniversity of Calgary
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPsychological interventionMedical emergencyMedicinePoison controlInjury preventionOccupational safety and healthIntervention (counseling)Suicide preventionLogistic regressionHuman factors and ergonomicsPopulationEmergency medicineEnvironmental healthPsychiatry

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

INTRODUCTION: Despite evidence that immediate rescue and initiation of resuscitation plays a vital role in determining the outcome of a drowning person, research on lay rescuer interventions remains limited. We explored lay rescuer interventions in fatal drowning incidents in Canada and described the characteristics of lay rescuers who had a fatal outcome while attempting to rescue another person. METHODS: We reviewed all unintentional drowning deaths that occurred in Canada (2010-2019) identified by the Drowning Prevention Research Centre. We determined the adjusted OR of lay rescuer intervention for different drowning incident characteristics using multivariable logistic regression. Using descriptive statistics, we described incidents where a lay rescuer fatally drowned while attempting to perform a rescue. RESULTS: During the study period, 4535 people died as the result of unintentional drowning incidents in Canada. There was an attempted rescue in 2480 cases (54.7%) and most were by lay rescuers (n=1846, 74.4%). Lay rescuers frequently used a high-risk, contact rescue technique (n=895, 48.5%). Lay rescuers were more likely to respond when the drowning person was a child, was female, the drowning occurred in a pool, only one person was drowning and when there was no ice present in the body of water. 74 lay rescuers fatally drowned while attempting to save another person. CONCLUSIONS: Lay rescuers frequently intervened on drowning incidents with a high-risk, contact rescue. Since characteristics differed between drowning incidents where a lay rescuer response occurred (vs not), further investigation into rescuer motivation may inform tailored interventions to reduce rescuer injury.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.148
Threshold uncertainty score0.763

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.354
Teacher spread0.340 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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