Defining injury hospitalisations and deaths
This report aims to count and describe injury incidents that result in hospital admission/s or death.
Our counting method is different to some other AIHW reporting, where each use of a service may be counted (e.g. MyHospitals), rather than each causal incident. A single incident can lead to more than one use of a service. Our exclusion method minimises double-counting where possible.
If a person dies from an injury after being admitted to hospital, both the hospitalisation and the death were counted for this report.
Injury hospitalisations
The terms ‘injury hospitalisation’, ‘hospitalised injury’ and ‘hospitalised case’ in this report refer to incidents where a person was admitted to hospital with injury as the main reason. If a single incident led to an admission in more than one hospital, the incident has only been counted once. Details are in the Technical notes.
Exclusions
To avoid double-counting hospitalised injuries, we have excluded admissions that are transfers from another hospital and admissions with rehabilitation procedures (except for acute hospital admissions).
Emergency department (ED) care is a form of non-admitted hospital care and not counted here. See the AIHW MyHospitals topic for information on ED presentations due to injury.
Injuries caused by complications of surgery or other medical care, or injuries that are a subsequent condition caused by a previous injury, are not included in this report.
For details about methodology, see the Technical notes.