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The costs of unintentional home injuries

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2004.09.016Get rights and content

Background

Unintentional home injuries impose significant, but little reported, costs to society. The most tangible are medical and indirect costs. A less-tangible cost is the value of lost quality of life due to impairment or death.

Methods

A societal perspective was adopted in estimating unintentional home injury costs. All costs associated with the injuries are included in the analysis—costs to victims, families, government, insurers, and taxpayers. The costs are incidence based, meaning all costs that will result from an injury over time are counted in the year that the injury occurs.

Results

Unintentional home injuries cost U.S. society at least $217 billion in 1998. The cost of fatal unintentional injuries alone was $34 billion, with nonfatal injuries accounting for the remaining $183 billion. The largest cost was the value of lost quality of life at $162 billion. Medical costs and indirect costs were $22 billion and $33 billion, respectively.

Conclusions

These estimates indicate that unintentional home injuries, especially falls, are a major problem in the United States. Falls are a particular problem in need of more attention.

Introduction

Unintentional home injuries impose significant, but little reported, costs to society. Few studies have examined these costs. Danseco et al.1 analyzed nonfatal home injury costs for people aged 0 to 20 years in the United States; Scuffham et al.2 analyzed medical costs of unintentional falls in older people in the United Kingdom; and Thanh et al.3 analyzed the economic burden of unintentional home injuries in a Vietnamese district. This study provides the first comprehensive analysis of unintentional home injury costs in the United States. Its results can be used to better characterize the problem, weigh its importance, guide resource allocation, and evaluate savings from interventions.

Section snippets

Methods

The annual cost of injuries in the home was computed by multiplying unit costs of an injury by diagnosis, age group, and outcome/treatment level (fatal, nonfatal hospital admitted, other medically treated nonfatal) times corresponding injury frequency counts. The unit costs of injury used in this study are a data set compiled in prior studies.4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Although the costing methods are summarized here, more detail is available in the source articles. Data sources for injury counts were the

Results

Unintentional home injuries cost society at least $217 billion in 1998. The cost of fatal unintentional injuries alone was $34 billion, with nonfatal injuries accounting for the remaining $183 billion. The largest cost was the value of lost quality of life at $162 billion. Medical costs and indirect loss costs were $22 billion and $33 billion, respectively.

These figures are based on NHIS injury estimates. If the CPSC’s surveillance system is used to estimate the number of injuries, the total

Discussion

This study presents the first comprehensive U.S. unintentional home injury cost estimates. Due to incidence discrepancies between NHIS and NEISS data, the range of total cost estimates was large ($217 billion to $379 billion). In addition, because this study used unit costs data from other studies, some of the cost factors are based on old data or are not tailored by age group.

Although current data do not precisely enumerate unintentional injuries in the home and their costs, clearly the

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