The NZIPS serious non-fatal injury indicators are based on counts of incident cases discharged from hospital who have a serious injury as defined by an ICISS threshold. (International Classification of Diseases (ICD) based Injury Severity Score.) The threshold was set to count only injuries with diagnoses that have a high probability of admission so that the effects of any extraneous influences on the hospital data-based indicator trends would be removed (for example, changes in health service provision). The ability of this process to achieve this end has not been tested empirically although it appears to do so. Estimates of the diagnosis-specific probabilities of admission would increase our confidence in the NZIPS indicators, but require emergency department (ED) data that are accurately coded to ICD and are known to have resulted in subsequent admission to hospital. Because such data were not available in New Zealand international partners for this project were sought.

Aims:
– To validate the existing NZIPS serious non-fatal injury indicators;
– To provide the opportunity to develop serious injury indicators which capture a greater number of serious injuries; and
– To develop methods for international comparisons.

Project Team: Colin Cryer, Pauline Gulliver, Brandon de Graaf, Gabrielle Davie, John Langley.