142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

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Childhood Injury Prevention Assessment in Wake County, NC: What do the data tell us?

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Monday, November 17, 2014

Anna E. Waller, ScD , Department of Emergency Medicine, Carolina Center for Health Informatics, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Chapel Hil, NC
Steven Lippmann, MPH , Department of Emergency Medicine, Carolina Center for Health Informatics, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
Amy Ising, MSIS , Department of Emergency Medicine, Carolina Center for Health Informatics, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
Carolyn E. Crump, PhD , Department of Health Behavior, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
Background/Purpose:  A local foundation commissioned our project to identify leading causes of childhood injury in Wake County, NC.  We utilized multiple sources of secondary data to describe childhood injury in the county and determine leading causes.

 Methods:  Mortality, hospital discharge and emergency department (ED) visit data were used to develop an overall picture of injury mortality and morbidity among children age 0 through 17 years in Wake County.  Additional data from the poison control center and EMS were also examined.  Injuries were categorized using diagnosis and external cause of injury codes; descriptive statistics and cross-tabulations were computed.  The top five injury causes occurring in each of the three main data sources (mortality, hospital discharge, and ED visits) were examined to determine the leading causes of injuries occurring among Wake County children.

 Results: There were 124 deaths and 3,007 hospital discharges for Wake County children from injury causes during the years 2006-2011, and 138,047 injury-related ED visits during 2006-2012.  The child injury rates were 0.08 deaths, 2.22 hospital discharges, and 94.31 ED visits per 1,000 person years.  The leading causes of childhood injury were motor vehicle crashes, assaults, self-inflicted injuries, falls, suffocation, burns, struck by/against, natural/environment factors, and bicycle crashes.

 Conclusions:   Childhood injury is an important public health issue in Wake County, NC.  The demographics of injured children varied by data source and injury cause.  Recommendations include further data analyses for leading causes of childhood injury as well as improvements to coding for injury cause at the mechanism and sub-mechanism level.

Learning Areas:

Epidemiology
Public health or related research

Learning Objectives:
Describe leading causes of childhood injury for Wake County, NC. Identify demographic patterns for various causes of childhood injury. Compare various data sources for analyzing childhood injury within a community.

Keyword(s): Data Collection and Surveillance, Child Health

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I was responsible for the data identification and analysis part of the Wake County Childhood Injury Prevention Assessment. I supervised the data analyses and led the reporting of results. I have been conducting injury prevention and control research and evaluation for over 30 years.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

Back to: 3090.0: Unintentional injury across the age span