Youngsters’ drowning close calls costing ACC

More than 1500 New Zealanders who narrowly escaped drowning over the past five years have racked up more than $5 million in ACC bills — and the biggest chunk of these patients were preschoolers.

The number of our tots who had near misses while frolicking in the waves or splashing in a pool has jumped in recent years and has been labelled “a major concern” by Water Safety’s Jonty Mills.

“Injuries and hospitalisations as a result of near drownings have risen rapidly in recent years, resulting in a significant rise in ACC claims,” Mills said.

Accident Compensation Corporation figures revealed to the Herald under the Official Information Act showed the total paid out for the 1581 active near drowning claims from 2012 to 2016 was $5,645,830.

The number of near drownings recorded in 2012 was 260 and active claims cost $732,452. But last year that figure jumped to 366, adding up to a bill of $1,350,082.

Over a third of the claims made last year were for children under the age of 10 — of those, 111 were under 5 and 39 were between 5 and 9. In 2015, there were 84 claims for children under 5.

The figures look particularly grim when paired with a spike in the number of preschoolers who have died in preventable water accidents.

Seven children under the age of 5 have died in preventable water accidents so far this year compared with two at the same time last year.

Whanganui local Mason Toohill, 5, is one of those who could have died in an incident his mother Holly called “terrifying”.

The boy, who at the time was 4, was playing in the pool at the Whanganui Splash Centre in May this year when his mum noticed something was wrong.

Mason was bouncing around in the water and kept going under, then coming up again, she said.

“And then he went down again and . . . I knew something was wrong.”

She reached for him from the side of the pool.

“He was all blue and he looked terrified.

“I pulled him out of the pool with one arm and ran to the lifeguard and I laid him on his back. He wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t do anything. I was freaking out.”

From there, Toohill said everything was a bit of a blur. Mason seemed to start breathing again and he spewed out some water but was otherwise unresponsive.

At the hospital, doctors told Toohill that once water got into the lungs, the body becomes instantly exhausted. It could take just seconds for things to go very wrong.

Starship children’s hospital director of child health Dr Mike Shepherd said for every child who died as a result of drowning, about five more sustained some degree of permanent brain damage as a result of near drowning.

“The types of injury that we see that are the most serious relate to hypoxic brain injury — essentially children not getting enough oxygen to their brain for a period of time.”

Shepherd said on the severe end of the injury spectrum a child could sustain a brain injury, making them incapable of carrying out normal activities or caring for themselves.