Injuries in the European Union 2013-2015 - Supplementary report to the 6th edition of “Injuries in the EU 2012-2014”

The EU IDB is a unique data source that contains standardized cross-national data on the external causes and circumstances of injuries examined and treated in emergency department of hospitals. Its main purpose is to facilitate the development and evaluation of injury prevention policies and programmes, which aim to control external risks.
IDB data are collected by dedicated national agencies and provided to the EU IDB data base, which is hosted by the DG SANTE (Health and Food Safety), to provide central access for various stakeholders as governments, researchers, safety promotion agencies and businesses. At EU level, the system is legally based on the Council Recommendation on the Prevention of Injury and the Promotion of Safety 2007 [1] and the EU Regulation on Community Statistics on Public Health and Health and Safety at Work 2008 [2] and other decisions. For more details on background and methodology see the IDB Operating Manual [3] and the IDB metadata [4]. IDB data can be publicly accessed at the EU IDB web-gate [5]. For the functioning of the web-gate see the brochure [6].
The IDB surveillance system uses two data sets of different complexity. The Full Data Set (IDB-FDS) depicts quite many details of an injury event, particularly external circumstances of the incidence as place of occurrence, mechanism of injury, activity carried out by the patient when injured and on involved substances, products or counterparts [7]. As the completion of such a comprehensive data set requires dedicated and trained staff and assigned financial resources, most countries which collect IDB-FDS data do this only in one or a few hospitals.
The Minimum Dataset (IDB-MDS) is much simpler and the information needed for its completion is usually already covered by the patient’s history as recorded in the standard patient information system. IDB-MDS can be completely extracted from IDB-FDS data, but also from data using ICD-10 or NOMESCO classification. The collection of IDB-MDS data is possible for large samples without noteworthy additional burden to staff and patients and without noteworthy additional resources of hospitals, apart from the resources needed for implementation and maintenance of data flow [8].
While IDB-FDS data provides the basis for qualitative analyses of external circumstances and injury patterns, the main purpose of IDB-MDS is to provide public health indicators as incidence rates of road, work-place or home accidents, injuries due to assaults or deliberate self-harm. IDB-MDS data are publicly accessible at the EU IDB web-gate [5], while IDB-FDS data can be analysed only by eligible persons due to data protection regulations.
While the previous report on “Injuries in the EU”, published in September 2016 [9] provided comprehensive statistical analyses of the health burden of injuries due to fatalities, hospital admissions and ambulatory treatments in emergency departments, including first estimates for all European Core Health indicators (ECHIs) on injuries, this report has a complementary function. It focusses on the quality of data and on the data flow from countries over 2010-2016. It provides information e.g. about the number of reporting countries, type of national agencies, size of the samples and scope of the data collection. The metadata files, which accompany the national IDB data files, are the main information source for these (see Annex). In addition, the report presents a summary analysis of MDS-level data related to the years 2013-2015.
This report serves as a supplement to the sixth edition of the report on “Injuries in the EU” [9] and its main purpose is to inform the European Commission, IDB-Network members and other stakeholders in EU health information system and to facilitate informed decision making about the future of the EU injury surveillance system.
This report is produced under the BRIDGE-Health project (Work package 9 “Platform for injury surveillance), which aims to prepare the basis for a comprehensive EU health information system and which received co-funding from the EU Health Programme.
Published by European Association for Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion (EuroSafe)