Injury Surveillance On-Line

How to Use Canadian Injury Surveillance On-Line

Instructions:

Within each section, you will see a number of menu choices to narrow down your selection. Whenever you see a down arrow or slider bar, more choices are available. One or possibly more can be selected. The options you are allowed to select vary according to the page you are on. On certain pages you can select multiple diseases, age groups or provinces. Only one multiple selection is allowed per chart. Please see the Glossary for definitions of these terms. Also note the check box for black and white printing. What this does is to make sure that the charts are clear when printing. When your selections are complete, click on the [View Chart button].When you see your chart, you have the option of downloading the data to your personal computer. If your choices were not exactly as you wanted please hit the back button on your browser to modify your choices. Please note on certain graphs there may be some blank bars or lines if the values used in creating the graphs are very small or null. At all times the glossary will be available to aid in your selection.

In the mapping pages, pressing the [UPDATE MAP] button will map the selected combination of cause of injury, age group, year, and gender at the province level using a quintile classification.

Standardization:

Data have been standardized to the 1991 rates from Canadian population. It is inappropriate to compare rates from similar data standardized to another standard population as differences may be solely related to changes in the underlying population distribution.

Data Sources:

Data were obtained from Statistics Canada (mortality), Canadian Institute for Health for Health Information (hospitalization), and the Injury and Child Maltreatment Section (emergency department visits). All analyses were done by the Injury and Child Maltreatment Section, Health Surveillance and Epidemiology Division, Centre for Health Promotion, Public Health Agency of Canada.

Limitations:

There is a lag time of approximately two to three years in the availability of mortality data, due mainly to collection and refinement issues associated with the provinces and territories, Statistics Canada and Public Health Agency of Canada. Hospitalization and emergency department visit data are presented for periods that correspond to those for available mortality data. In contrast to the hospitalization and mortality data, the emergency department visit data from the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP) are not population based. CHIRPP is an emergency department based injury surveillance program operated by Health Canada in 10 children's and 4 general hospitals. For this reason, older adolescents and adults are under-represented in the database.

Disease Groupings:

All disease and injury groups used follow the 9th and 10th revisions of the International Classification of Disease (ICD-9) published by the World Health Organization. For more information, please follow the links below:

• Broad Disease Groups (ICD-9)
• Implementation of ICD-10
• ICD-9 to ICD-10 Transition Matrix
• Injury Framework (Mechnism by Intent)(ICD-9)
• Health Canada Supplement to Injury Framework (ICD-9)

Interpretation:

The data provided here are for public use but care must be taken in interpreting results. If a younger age group or a smaller province/area for a specific injury is chosen, a larger year to year percent variation is expected due to the smaller number of cases. Any sudden changes from year to year could be due to random fluctuation in the data that may not be a real trend. No statistical testing of significant differences is provided on this website. As with other epidemiological information, data displayed on graphs may indicate an association but should not be interpreted as proof of a causal association. Also, observed variations may result from differences in injury treatment and registration practices, in addition to lifestyle or environmental factors. Standardized rates must be used with care because they may obscure important differences in age-specific patterns. They are summary measures that are fictitious and in most cases can only be used forcomparison purposes with other data standardized to the same standard population.