The Fatal Drowning Dashboard: Empowering Drowning Prevention
with Data-Driven Insights

Royal Life Saving – Australia has launched a free to use, public-facing dashboard with data from the Royal Life Saving National Fatal Drowning Database.

Data guides our decisions and actions wherever possible. Since the first National Drowning Report in 1995 to the latest edition launched at Parliament House, producing quality research and robust evidence has been central to Royal Life Saving – Australia's drowning prevention efforts for over 30 years. An essential foundation for this work has been the Royal Life Saving National Fatal Drowning Database – a meticulously maintained catalogue of every unintentional drowning death that has occurred in Australia.

Guided by our core values of Collaboration and Community, we were motivated to create a tool that empowers individuals and organisations to access, explore, and interpret insights from fatal drowning data in a new and engaging way. We are therefore making this data more accessible via an interactive dashboard, which we hope to update with additional features in the future. Sharing this information with those who are also working to prevent drowning will make all our efforts more effective, and ultimately save lives.

The Dashboard provides multiple ways to query fatal drowning data that has previously been published in National Drowning Reports. At the time of launch, this includes data from July 2002 through June 2024. Users may build a custom time series line chart, bar charts, and tables, with both the fatal drowning count and rate per 100,000 population. You can select which variables to see and filter the graphic or table on a variety of different settings.

We expect to add new drowning cases to the dashboard annually when the National Drowning Report is released, typically in September of each year, and update the dashboard periodically throughout the year as information on previous cases becomes available.

To access the Royal Life Saving Fatal Drowning Dashboard, you will need to sign up (for free) and login into the new Data Portal section of the Royal Life Saving – Australia website. Here you can access the Dashboard, submit an Advanced Data Request to the Royal Life Saving Research team, and let us know the future Dashboard features that would be helpful for your work.

Click here to create a free account and login: https://www.royallifesaving.com.au/data