Data collection and analysis on the burden of injuries: Lessons learned from the IDB network

The EU-IDB (European Injury Database) contains cross-national data on the external causes and circumstances of injuries treated in the emergency departments of hospitals. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the development and evaluation of injury prevention policies and programmes, which aim to control external risks. The information is complementary to death and hospital discharge statistics and specific surveillance systems on road and workplace accidents. Unique is the wealth of information about external circumstances of injuries as needed for evidence-based prevention actions. The IDB data are collected by dedicated national agencies and provided to the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) which hosts the databank. As part of the EU BRIDGE-Health initiative 2017 (WP9-Injury Surveillance Platform), the EU-IDB Network was commissioned to generate comparable burden of injury estimates across Europe: “Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY) estimates for injury utilising the European Injury Data Base (IDB)”. DALY estimates were generated for IDB countries and years where both fatal and non-fatal injury data were available. Non-fatal injury data were acquired from Emergency Department data recorded in the IDB Minimum Data Set (MDS), fatal data were obtained from the European Detailed Mortality Database (EDMD). The general approach to calculating DALYs followed that of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study but utilised new and different disability weights created by the the Injury-VIBES cohort and detailed injury incidence data from nineteen countries. DALY estimates were between 2-10 times larger than estimates generated by previous studies such as the GBD study, due to much higher incidence figures and larger disability weights. In the workshop, the most recent results of the EU-IDB and the respective DALY estimates will be presented and discussed.