The epidemiology of life-threatening work-related injury--a demonstration paper.

BACKGROUND

Workers' compensation (WC) data traditionally provides information to stakeholders on work-related disabling injuries. It is important to complement this with information on serious threat to life (TTL) injury, which is the focus of this paper.

METHODS

In this cross-sectional descriptive epidemiological study, based on New Zealand's WC data linked to hospital discharge data, TTL was measured using the ICD10-based Injury Severity Score (ICISS); ICISS ≤ 0.941 was used to define serious TTL injury.

RESULTS

During 2002-2004, there was an average of 368 serious TTL work-related injury cases annually. The distribution of these injuries was very different from those traditionally found using WC data to describe disabling injury. For example, for serious TTL injury the main injury types included traumatic brain injury, whereas for disabling injury it was sprains and dislocations.

CONCLUSIONS

The method presented provides the opportunity for government agencies to produce a national description of the epidemiology of serious TTL work-related injuries.