Evidence and Data
What is WAID?
The NWSF’s Water Incident Database (WAID), which was launched in 2007 brings together water-related incident data from a wide range of sources within the UK from existing sources of data, including search and rescue reports, coroners' reports and media reporting.
The key aims of WAID are:
- To provide insight into levels of risk associated with water-related activities, enabling meaningful comparisons with activities outside the water sector, and the determination of risk acceptability
- To provide a coordinated, national approach to the capture of water-related incident data
- To produce high quality, comprehensive data
The WAID data is used to inform the annual reports , the interactive report and the and the UK Drowning Prevention Strategy.
WAID updates
Taxonomy review
2023 saw the development of new taxonomies for the data to improve the range of activity and location data. This was used in the 2023 annual report and are currently being used in ongoing reporting.
Data Enhancement
The WAID enhancement project was undertaken by RoSPA, on behalf of the NWSF, to improve the WAID dataset. This was done for two primary reasons:
- The need to overturn the high number of "not recorded" outcomes, giving a more robust data set (which could more accurately measure against the UK Drowning Prevention Strategy baseline)
- To match recent updates to the WAID taxonomy
Key objectives were to:
- Provide the UK Drowning Prevention Strategy review with an up to date and robust data set
- To match the previous four-year data to the new 2023 WAID taxonomy and reconfigure ONS regional data.
Future of WAID
The NWSF are currently reviewing what data we collect and how we can maximise report outputs so prevention and messaging can be improved and targeted. This is ongoing work and you can be kept updated by joining our mailing list here.
Contact us about WAID
Should you wish to share any data or information related to a one-off event, please contact us or if you are from a coroner’s office and wish to provide us with information, please contact us at waid@nationalwatersafety.org.uk.
If you have any general questions regarding WAID, please contact us at info@nationalwatersafety.org.uk.