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:

1700 hospitalisations in 2020–21

6.5 per 100,000 population

 990 deaths in 2019–20

3.9 per 100,000 population

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.

Hospitalisations where the cause of injury is W44 Foreign body entering into or through eye or natural orifice and the type of injury is a foreign body in the respiratory tract (T17.2–T17.8) were included under Contact with objects in previous versions of this report. For this update, these injuries have been re-classified here under Choking and suffocation. 

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).

Table 1a: Causes of choking and suffocation hospitalisation, 2020–21

Cause

Hospitalisations

%

Rate (per 100,000)

Foreign body in respiratory tract (W44 + T17.2–T17.8)

672

41

2.6

Inhalation and ingestion of food causing obstruction of respiratory tract (W79)

545

33

2.1

Inhalation and ingestion of objects other than food causing obstruction of respiratory tract (W80)

345

21

1.3

Other (W75–78, W81–84)

95

6

0.4

Total

1,657

100

6.5

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.

Table 1b: Causes of choking and suffocation death, 2019–20

Cause

Deaths

%

Rate (per 100,000)

Inhalation and ingestion of objects other than food causing obstruction of respiratory tract (W80)

770

78

3.0

Inhalation and ingestion of food causing obstruction of respiratory tract (W79)

114

11

0.4

Other (W75–78, W81–84)

108

11

0.4

Total

                          992

100

3.9

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

2 matching line graphs on separate tabs, 1 for hospitalisations and 1 for deaths. The 3 lines represent the trend for males, persons and females over 10 years. The reader can choose to display rate per 100,000 population or number.

Visualisation not available for printing

 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

Column graph representing sex within 6 life-stage age groups. The reader can choose to display either rate per 100,000 population or number, and either hospitalisations or deaths. The default displays rate of hospitalisations for males and females and the reader can also choose to display persons.

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).
Table 2: Severity of choking and suffocation injuries, 2020–21 hospitalisations
 

Choking and suffocation

All injuries

Average number of days in hospital

2.2

4.4

% of cases with time in an ICU

4.6

2.2

% of cases involving continous ventilatory support

4.1

1.2

In-hospital deaths (per 1,000 cases)

16.3

5.3

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).

Table 3a: Age-standardised rates of hospitalisation (per 100,000) due to choking and suffocation, by remoteness and sex, 2020–21
 

 Males

 Females

 Persons

Major cities

             6.7

              5.5

              6.1

Inner regional

             6.1

              4.9

              5.5

Outer regional

             8.1

              6.3

              7.2

Remote

 n.p.

 n.p.

              7.2

Very remote

 n.p.

 n.p.

 n.p.

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.

Table 3b: Age-standardised rates of death (per 100,000) due to choking and suffocation, by remoteness and sex, 2019–20
 

Males

Females

Persons

Major cities

4.0

2.6

3.2

Inner regional

3.6

1.5

2.5

Outer regional

4.1

2.3

3.2

Remote

n.p.

n.p.

n.p.

Very remote

n.p.

n.p.

n.p.

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