Background Injury is a major cause of mortality and morbidity. The emergency department (ED) registry based data, provides a cost-effective way to estimate the burden of injuries. Previous studies in general population have suggested that survey based data collection is not efficient and suffers from recall or selection bias. The aim of this study was to compare the yearly incidence of home, leisure, traffic and work injuries estimated by survey-based and registry based methods among adults in Luxembourg.

Methods Survey based data on 1529 residents aged 25–64, were collected during 2013/2014 in the frame of the European Health Examination Survey (EHES). Luxembourgish ED registry based data supplied to the European Injury Data Base (IDB) for the period 2013–2014 were used for the comparison. Both IDB and EHES are now part of the BRIDGE-Health (BRidging Information and Data Generation for Evidence-based Health Policy and Research) development.

Results The estimated incidence rate of all the selected injuries from registry-based data was 8.4% in 2013 and 8.3% in 2014. From survey based data the incidence of; injuries treated in hospital (CI: 95%) was 8.8% (7.7%; 10.4%), treated outside the hospital was 3.6% (2.8%: 4.7%) and not medically treated was 2.7% (2.0%: 3.7%).

Conclusions Both survey and registry based data are concordant in estimating ED treated injury incidence among 25–64 years old in Luxembourg.