Objectives

More than 200 million tourists are travelling within the EU each year and many of them engage in recreational activities and sports during their winter and summer holidays abroad. Not all of these activities are hazard free.
However, little is known about their accompanying risks of accidents and injuries. This results in negligence of safety promotion programmes for tourists.
In Austria for example, the number of skiing accidents in tourists exceeds the number of skiing accidents in the resident population by a factor of three. Similar discrepancies are expected in other European destinations for winter tourism and - although in different activities - in summer tourism as well.
Although certain EU countries have records about incidences of tourist accidents based on the additional classification of nationality in their HLA data collection system (e.g. Greece and Netherlands), no comprehensive view of the scope of tourist accidents in the European Union is available. As the treatment of injuries of tourists often is split between the destination and the residence country, little is known about the consequences of tourist accidents as well.
Therefore we propose to analyse this problem within the IPP WP 2001 by means of a status quo inventory and analysis of relevant data and reports (social insurance data, health statistics, results from other EU-projects on trans-border services; e.g. in road safety) and supplementary survey (questionnaire) within the national HLA data collection systems (pilot for selected countries).

For more information please contact Robet Bauer from Sicher Leben: Robert.Bauer@sicherleben.at