Let’s talk about the weather: injuries related to extreme weather

Table 4 summarises the extent to which weather-related injuries can be identified in existing individual national data sources.

Other existing data sets with the potential to contribute to the weather-related injury knowledge base include:

• transport databases
• drowning databases
• workplace compensation claim data
• Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) data
• Ambulance and other emergency management services datasets

Most of these do not include weather-related information but could be of use within a weather-event based approach to analysis. Some of these data sets do not include injury information either (for example, MBS and PBS data) but could provide supporting context where there has been an extreme weather event.

Hospitalisations

National hospital separations data were sourced from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) National Hospital Morbidity Database (NHMD).

Please refer to the technical notes for Injury in Australia for more detail.

Note: ICD-10-AM classifications experts were consulted in the compilation of this list. X00 – Exposure to uncontrolled fire, in building or structure was intentionally not included, based on advice received.

Deaths

Please refer to the technical notes for injury in Australia for our standard case ascertainment criteria.

Death data are commonly recorded according to the calendar year in which the death was registered. However, in this report data are presented according to the financial year in which each death occurred, because:

• presenting data by year of occurrence is more meaningful than by year of registration, because some cases are registered much later than when the death occurred (sometimes years later).
• reporting by financial year aligns with AIHW reports on injury morbidity, enabling deaths and hospitalisations to be presented for the same period.

The sum of the counts of death by cause may be greater than the total number of injury deaths because some deaths have multiple causes.

The ‘Persons’ total includes deaths for which sex was not reported. All age totals include deaths where age is not reported.

Outlined below are the ICD-10 codes included in the analysis in Chapter 3 (WHO 2019). 

Defining and counting injury in this report

Some of the ICD10 and external cause coding combinations outlined above could apply to injuries sustained during ‘normal’ weather conditions when combined with inappropriate behaviour or unintended exposure. For example, it is possible to sustain hypothermia due to exposure to cold water in a situation such as falling into the water from a boat.

The codes for bushfires given would also apply to types of outdoor fires other than bushfires, such as an injury from a briefly uncontained campfire. It is not possible to distinguish bushfire-related from other injuries within these codes.

State and territory data are based on the state of usual residence of the case. The exception to this is the analysis of hospitalisations in the Northern Rivers region of NSW during 2021-2022, which is based on state of establishment.

With the data currently available in Australia, there are three approaches to linking an injury event with weather conditions. This report takes an injury-based approach.

1. An injury-based approach, where injuries with explicitly weather-related diagnoses or external causes are identified in health care, workers’ compensation and deaths databases. Health care providers record the involvement of weather in an injury event.
2. A weather event-based approach, where significant weather events are identified and health care and deaths databases are investigated for any trends or changes in injury data at the time period and location of the weather event.
3. Burden-of-disease methodology uses modelling to attribute injuries to weather-related exposures. The Australian Burden of Disease Study currently attributes injuries like those due to fire, burns and scalds to the risk factors of occupational exposures and hazards, and alcohol use. Work is currently underway to develop this methodology in regard to heat-related workplace injuries. This indirect method requires sufficient evidence of a causal association between exposure and health outcomes from high-quality epidemiological studies and to meet a number of criteria to enable estimation and inclusion in the Australian Burden of Disease Study (AIHW 2022).

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2022) Australian Burden of Disease Study 2022, AIHW, Australian Government, accessed 19 July 2023. 

Bureau of Meteorology (2022) Severe weather hazards, BoM, Australia Government, accessed 10 July 2023. 

WHO (World Health Organization) (2019) The international statistical classification of diseases and related health problems, 10th revision (ICD-10), Geneva: WHO, accessed 12 May 2022.