TY - JOUR PY - 2023// TI - External causes of emergency department presentations: a missing piece to understanding unintentional childhood injury in Australia JO - Emergency medicine Australasia A1 - Catchpoole, Jesani A1 - Niven, Catherine A1 - Möller, Holger A1 - Harrison, James E. A1 - Ivers, Rebecca A1 - Craig, Simon A1 - Vallmuur, Kirsten SP - ePub EP - ePub VL - ePub IS - ePub N2 - OBJECTIVE: To identify external causes of unintentional childhood injury presenting to Australian EDs.

METHODS: Six major paediatric hospitals in four Australian states supplied de-identified ED data for 2011-2017 on age, sex, attendance time/date, presenting problem, injury diagnosis, triage category and mode of separation. Three hospitals supplied data on external cause and intent of injury. A machine classifier tool was used to supplement the missing external cause coding in the remaining hospitals to enable the compilation of a standardised dataset for childhood injury causes analysis.

RESULTS: A total of 486 762 ED presentations for unintentional injury in children aged 0-14 years were analysed. The leading specified cause of ED presentations was low fall (35.0%) followed by struck/collision with an object (13.8%) with little sex difference observed. Males aged 10-14 years had higher rates of motorcycle, pedal cycle and fire/flame-related injury and lower rates of horse-related injury and drug/medicinal substance poisoning compared with females. The leading specified external cause resulting in hospitalisation was low fall (32.2%) followed by struck/collision with an object (11.1%). The injuries with the highest proportion of children being hospitalised were drownings (64.4%), pedestrian (53.4%), motorcycle (52.7%) and horse-related injuries (50.0%).

CONCLUSIONS: This is the first large-scale study since the 1980s to explore external causes of unintentional childhood injury presenting to Australian paediatric EDs. It demonstrates a hybrid human-machine learning approach to create a standardised database to overcome data deficiencies. The results supplement existing knowledge of hospitalised paediatric injury to better understand the causes of childhood injury by age and sex, which require health service utilisation.

Language: en

LA - en SN - 1742-6731 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1742-6723.14259 ID - ref1 ER -