Abstract
Unintentional injuries continue to be a leading cause for children to seek emergency medical care. We used the electronic Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (eCHIRPP) database to examine the leading causes of unintentional injury emergency department visits among children aged 0 to 14 from 2015 to 2019. This database is an emergency department-based injury and poisoning sentinel surveillance system that operates in hospitals across Canada. The surveillance system collects data on injuries of people presenting to Emergency Departments.
Since the epidemiology of children’s injuries may have changed during the pandemic, we included only records pre-COVID-19 pandemic in the data extraction; therefore, the years for the analysis were from 2015 to 2019. For the statistical analysis, frequency distributions (counts and percentages) were calculated for all variables. In addition, descriptive statistics, including mean, median, standard deviation, and interquartile range, were also calculated by age range. A total of 388,533 unintentional injury cases were reported to eCHIRPP for children aged 0 to 14 between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2019, 56.4% (n=219,296) were male and 43.6% (n=169,233) were female. Injuries happened most frequently in residential settings (39.0%) and at school (18.1%). A higher proportion of injuries in a residential setting occurred among children aged 0 to 4 years (63.7%) and 5 to 9 years (31.6%), while older children in the 10 to the 14-year age group were more likely to be injured at school (29.5%).
The ten leading causes of unintentional injuries ranked in order were: falls, struck by/against objects, foreign bodies entering the eye or natural orifice, transport injuries in traffic, cut or pierce by an object, transport injuries in non-traffic, poisoning, exposure to smoke/fire/flames, exposure to nature, and other and unspecified transport injuries. This project's findings provide information and contribute to understanding the pattern and burden of unintentional injuries in Canada among children aged 0 to 14 years and can inform policy and decision-making in injury prevention for the future.