Background The knowledge of the national number of victims of home and leisure injuries is a first step to quantify their importance and to develop preventive actions.

Objective To estimate incidence rates of emergency visits due to home and leisure injuries among persons aged 15 years and above in France in 2006.

Method A Poisson mixed model was used to estimate the ratio between the number of emergency visits due to home and leisure injuries and the number of hospitalisations for injury. The number of emergency visits was obtained from emergency data of unintentional injuries collected in the hospitals of five French cities. The number of hospitalisations was available in national hospital administrative databases.

Results The national extrapolation of the ratio was used to estimate the number of people over 15 years injured by at least one home and leisure injuries in 2006 to 2.7 million (95% CI 2.0 to 3.3). This corresponds to an incidence rate of 5.3 (3.9 to 6.7) per 100 persons-year, 5.9 for men (4.3 to 7.4), and 4.8 for women (3.6 to 6.1).

Conclusion These estimations are close to those obtained from cross-sectional surveys and show the importance of the home and leisure injuries as a public health issue. This method is an interesting solution to obtain national estimations of the number of injuries by the use of the relationship between local specific data and national administrative data. It could be tested with other variables and for several years.