Electronic injury surveillance in an emergency department

Abstract

Injury control is one of the four priorities of the current National Health Strategy. Injury control targets are an integral part of this strategy and these require the measurement of the incidence of selected injuries. The strategy encourages local community based injury prevention programs. These programs need local data describing the determinants and distribution of injury in the particular community. Emergency department injury surveillance data is one source for this data. However manual data collection has been difficult to implement in Australian hospitals. This study reports an evaluation of the first electronic injury surveillance system integrated into an emergency department patient management system in Australia. This system was well accepted by emergency department staff and achieved good criteria validity in the range 88% to 100% on the injury data items. Emergency department nurses described the departmental requirement to collect injury data as being acceptable. Most nurses rated the injury coding system as satisfactory.

Electronic injury surveillance in Perth emergency departments: Validity of the data

“…Advances in electronic ED patient management systems in the past decade have made it easier to integrate injury surveillance into these broader ED systems. This integration has reduced the threats to validity that were present in earlier, non‐integrated injury surveillance systems 4–7 …”