Preventing injuries during winter activities

SALT LAKE CITY — Emergency room doctors are cautioning people about the importance of safely recreating this holiday weekend.

For parents like Adam Wayment, he was already on board when his boys pulled out their ski helmets and sleds at Sugar House Park.

“For skiing is a must have the speeds you’re traveling with the number of skiers on the slopes, you have to have a helmet… and for sledding same thing, you have to look at right what hill are you going to, how fast are you going to go does it make sense,” Wayment said.

But Intermountain Medical Center’s medical director of emergency medicine, Dr. Tom Nelson, said it’s not just sledding injuries he sees in his ER in Murray. He has been seeing many patients who slipped on ice, car crashes, and many ski-related injuries.

“I myself have treated a number of patients just in the last week who had really significant injuries and they all attributed to poor visibility conditions and falling off of areas that they didn’t see,” Nelson said.

He said a lot of these injuries and accidents were preventable.

“It’s inevitable that they were either going too fast… out of their comfort zone, trying to do a jump that was too big,” Nelson said.

But Nelson understands that people are excited to see the white stuff hitting Utah’s mountains. He just wants everyone to be safe.

“You know we see six inches of snow, and everyone is really enthusiastic about getting up to the resorts, myself included,” he said.