The future of a beloved piece of playground equipment is in doubt, with experts warning the number of injuries sustained on monkey bars is on the rise.

The humble monkey bar is a playground staple, but according to Dr Lisa Sharwood, an injury epidemiologist at the University of Sydney, it’s among the leading causes of injuries in children.   

Dr Sharwood, who has worked with Monash University’s Victorian Injury Surveillance Unit on research to be published in coming months which found a 41% increase in emergency department presentations in Victoria as a result of monkey bar injuries over the past decade.

"There were a total of 14,167 monkey bar related Emergency Department presentations, with 81% in the five to nine-year-old age group," she told Fairfax Media.

"There have been 6430 hospital admissions over this same time period as a result of the injuries sustained on monkey bars. Most of these will be fractures – upper limb and ankle, and many will have required surgery."

Professor David Eager echoes Dr Sharwood’s concerns. A professor of risk management at UTS and chair of Standards Australia’s Technical Committee CS-005 Playground Equipment, Eager has previously spoken to intouch about the need to introduce more risk into playgrounds and “not wrap kids in cotton wool”.

In fact, the Techncial Committee released a new standard in August 2017: AS 4685.0:2017, Playground equipment and surfacing – Part 0: Development, installation, inspection, maintenance and operation. The new standard, which superseded AS/NZS 4486.1:1997, introduced a risk benefit analysis technique that allows operators and owners of playgrounds to quantify their exposure to hazards using techniques that are simple to apply.

However, Eager told Fairfax Media he believed monkey bars were no longer a suitable addition to school and public playgrounds, and recommended they be replaced with space nets, which can break the fall of children who take a tumble.

"Most councils and schools have been pulling [monkey bars] out and replacing them with spatial nets ... [but] not as quickly as we'd like," he said. 

When the story was shared on IPWEA’s Facebook page, comments were mixed; some saw the move from monkey bars to space nets as logical, but the majority felt it was a slippery slope, and questioned what would be removed next. 

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