GUEST EDITORIAL
Epidemiology
Severity of injury measures and descriptive epidemiology
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Colin Cryer
Injury Prevention Research Unit, Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, University of Otago, P O Box 913, Dunedin, New Zealand; colin.cryer@ipru.otago.ac.nz
Accepted 31 January 2006
The ICISS method for deriving severity of injury is available to all and, until shown otherwise, it is the threat-to-life severity measure of choice for the ICD-10 era
Keywords: epidemiology; injury definition; Barell matrix
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In those countries with national hospital inpatient data systems, we want to use these admissions/discharges/separations (henceforth, referred to as admissions) data for a variety of purposes. At the population level, these include for describing the epidemiology of injury, developing injury indicators, and injury surveillance. In this editorial, I will concern myself solely with the use of these data for descriptive epidemiological purposes.
We know that health service use, following injury, including admission to hospital, is influenced by many factors that are independent of the severity of the injury, including bed availability, access (for example, distance from home to hospital/rurality), concern about intentionality (for example child abuse), and professional variations in practice.1 So, in a descriptive epidemiological analysis, using admission to hospital as the definition of a case of injury is likely to give a biased picture of the variations in injury incidence by person, place, or time, as well
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