About WIRA
The Challenge
Every year, approximately 600 people in Canada drown. In addition, there are numerous non-fatal water-related incidents and injuries. An understanding of the facts and causal risk factors is critical to the development of prevention and education strategies. Prior to the formation of WIRA, there was no central, easily accessible database of water incident information.
The Cost
$200+ million is spent annually on the treatment of water-related injuries and drownings. The human toll is immeasurable. WIRA is a non-profit alliance of members dedicated to addressing this problem by providing better research data.
The Answers
A reduction in the number of drownings and water-related injuries begins with an understanding of the facts. Knowing who, what, where and when will help us to understand why. All of those people deeply affected deserve answers.
Profile
WIRA is a non-profit alliance of members dedicated to delivering research data regarding water-related incidents, injuries and fatalities. We believe that the answer to prevention begins with a better understanding of the problems. Members include representatives of the Canadian Coast Guard, Lifesaving Society, Canadian Red Cross, Ontario Provincial Police, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the National Search and Rescue Secretariat, Parks and Recreation Ontario, the Cook-Rees Memorial Fund for Water Search & Safety and municipal recreation departments.
Membership
As a not-for-profit corporation, membership in the Water Incident Research Alliance is open to all paid WIRA members. Corporate members are voting members and private individual members are non-voting members. WIRA's business is managed by a volunteer board of directors. Directors are elected by the members at WIRA's annual general meeting. WIRA's day-to-day operations are managed by the WIRA manager, who is its lead staff person.
The Need For WIRA
Every year, approximately 600 Canadians drown. Their voices weren’t being heard. Since the early 1990's, the Canadian Red Cross and the Lifesaving Society have partnered with provincial and territorial coroners' offices to collect data on drownings and water-related deaths in Canada. There had been a delay of one to two years after incidents before the data on fatalities was available and even then, the information was not easily accessible.
Even more troubling is the fact that, prior to the establishment of WIRA, there was no data covering non-fatal water-related incidents and injuries along with the causal risk factors. Such information is essential to the development of prevention and education strategies.
Many stakeholders have said they want and need easy access to such data. These parties include municipal, provincial and federal governments; community health agencies; cottage associations; non-profit recreational organizations and related charitable organizations; local and regional health units; and the media. WIRA was created to answer this need.
Our Goal
We seek to provide organizations involved in water safety, boating, drowning prevention, and search and rescue with useful data:
- on non-fatal injuries and deaths;
- that is timely;
- that is systematically collected and recorded;
- that is easily accessible to a broad audience;
- that is user-friendly; and,
- that includes regional and local information.
The primary roles of WIRA are to:
- Collect, tabulate and publish Canadian water-related injury and death data in a timely manner.
- Reconcile WIRA's data with existing drowning reports produced by other organizations such as the Lifesaving Society, the Canadian Red Cross and the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).
- Provide links and contact information to other related databases.
WIRA's role is to provide "the facts." We provide our members with the who, what, where, when and why of water-related incidents and injuries. The data provided by WIRA enables our members to analyze and interpret these occurrences and develop a course of action.