Use of emergency department data to enhance routine injury surveillance: technical report, 2013–14

This report examines routinely collected national data on injury cases that attended a public hospital emergency department in Australia in 2013–14 and describes and illustrates possible applications of the data for injury surveillance. Use of different coding systems made identification of injury cases difficult in some instances. The data did not include a field for external cause of injury which markedly reduced the value of the data for injury surveillance. Despite these limitations, and while linked data studies are needed to provide a more complete assessment of emergency department injury data, the results reported here nevertheless suggest that the source has value for injury surveillance.