Choking and suffocation

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When a person’s air supply is partly or fully blocked, they are at risk of injury and death from choking or suffocation. This can occur when breathing is disrupted by a physical blockage, such as an object in the windpipe, or when a person is trapped in a low oxygen environment.

Choking and suffocation injuries resulted in:

This represents 7% of injury deaths and 0.3% of injury hospitalisations.

Choking on objects is the most common cause of death in this category, while a foreign body in the respiratory tract is the most common cause of hospitalised injury.

Older people have the highest rates of death by choking and suffocation, while young children have the highest rates of hospitalisation.

This report summarises data on unintentional choking and suffocation only. Intentional injuries are included under Self-harm injuries and suicide or Assault and homicide.

This category is also referred to as other accidental threats to breathing and is separate from drowning.

Causes of choking and suffocation

Inhalation or ingestion of an object other than food caused 78% of the deaths in this category in 2019–20 as well as 21% of the hospitalisations in 2020–21. A foreign body in the respiratory tract caused a further 41% of the hospitalisations. (Tables 1a and 1b).

Notes

1. Rates are crude per 100,000 population.
2. Percentages may not total 100 due to rounding.
3. Codes in brackets refer to the ICD-10-AM (11th edition) external cause codes (ACCD 2019).

Source: AIHW National Hospital Morbidity Database.

Notes

1. Rates are crude per 100,000 population.
2. Percentages may not total 100 due to rounding.
3. Codes in brackets refer to the ICD-10-AM (11th edition) external cause codes (ACCD 2019).

Source: AIHW National Mortality Database.

For more detail, see Data tables B5-6 and E7-9.

Seasonal differences

Hospitalisations due to choking and suffocation do not show a strong seasonal pattern.

Some other causes of injury do show seasonal differences in hospitalisations – see the interactive display.  

Figure 1: Seasonal differences in hospitalisations due to choking and suffocation, 2018–19 to 2020–21

Notes

1. Admission counts have been standardised into two 15-day periods per month.
2. A scale up factor has been applied to June admissions to account for cases not yet separated.

Source: AIHW National Hospital Morbidity Database.

Trends over time

The age-standardised rate of hospitalisations due to choking and suffocation in 2020–21 was 7.9% higher than the previous year.

Over the period from 2011–12 to 2016–17 there was an average annual increase of 0.6% for the age-standardised rate of hospitalisation.

There is a break in the time series for hospitalisations between 2016–17 and 2017–18, due to a change in data collection methods (see the technical notes for details).

For deaths due to choking and suffocation, the age-standardised rate for 2019–20 was 15% lower than a year earlier. Between 2010–11 and 2019–20 there was an average annual decrease in rate of 2.5% (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Choking and suffocation hospitalisations and deaths, by sex and year

 For more detail, see Data tables C1–3 and F1–4.

Age and sex differences

Rates of death due to choking and suffocation were highest for people aged 65 and over, while young children aged 0 to 4 had the highest rates of hospitalisation compared with other life-stage age groups.

Of the hospitalisations in 2020–21:

• 32% were for people aged 65 and over
• 26% were for children aged 0–4.

Males were 1.3 times as likely as females to be hospitalised for choking or suffocation in 2020–21.

Of the deaths in 2019–20, 80% were for people aged 65 and over (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Choking and suffocation hospitalisations and deaths, by age group and sex

For more detail, see Data tables A1-2 and D1–2.

Severity

There are many ways that the severity, or seriousness, of an injury can be measured. Some of the ways to measure the severity of hospitalised injuries are:

• number of days in hospital
• time in an intensive care unit (ICU)
• time on a ventilator
• in-hospital deaths.

Comparing choking and suffocation cases with all injuries in 2020–21:

• the average duration of a hospital stay was half as long
• the percentage of cases that included time in an ICU was more than twice as high
• the percentage of cases that involved continuous ventilator support was more than 3 times as high
• the rate of in-hospital deaths was more than 3 times as high (Table 2).

Note: Average number of days in hospital (length of stay) includes admissions that are transfers from 1 hospital to another or transfers from 1 admitted care type to another within the same hospital, except where care involves rehabilitation procedures.

Source: AIHW National Hospital Morbidity Database.

For more detail, see Data tables A13–15.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

There were 51 hospitalisations in 2020–21and 21 deaths in 2019–20 due to choking and suffocation among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

For more detail, see Data tables A1–3 and D4–9.

Remoteness

In 2020–21, people living in Outer regional areas had higher age-standardised rates of hospitalisation due to choking and suffocation than people living in less remote areas (Table 3).

n.p. not published because of small numbers, confidentiality, or other concerns about the quality of the data.
Note: Rates are age-standardised per 100,000 population.

Source: AIHW National Hospital Morbidity Database.

n.p. not published because of small numbers, confidentiality, or other concerns about the quality of the data.
Note: Rates are age-standardised per 100,000 population.

Source: AIHW National Hospital Morbidity Database.

For more detail, see Data tables A7–A9 and D9–10.

For information on how the statistics were calculated by remoteness, see the technical notes.

Data details

Technical notes: how the data were calculated

Data tables: download full data tables

Glossary
 

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