The Victorian Injury Surveillance Unit (VISU) now has updated cause of death data, sourced from the Australian Coordinating Registry.
The data will be a boon to those working in the safety promotion and injury prevention space, adding to the hospital admissions and emergency department presentations data already available from VISU, courtesy of the Department of Health.
VISU Research Fellow Angela Clapperton says the unit provides an important service to all levels of government, researchers, agencies and the media with an interest in injuries.
“It’s extremely important to let people know about injury issues and for the government to know what’s happening to their population,” Ms Clapperton says.
Whilst all the states have data collections for hospital admissions, only VISU and its Queensland counterpart provide detailed emergency department data collections.
“One of the strengths of the hospital treated data is that it captures cases that aren’t necessarily captured in other data sources. Take transport injury for example, hospital data includes cases that would not be in TAC or VicRoads datasets because all hospital treated cases are included — not only those related to people who make a claim or are registered in police statistics. Similarly, we just produced a report on intimate partner violence which included hospital treated cases that may not have been captured in police statistics.
“The datasets also contain detailed information for other causes of hospital-treated injury such as falls, poisoning and sports injury, to name just a few; it is very useful.”
Ms Clapperton says more local governments and agencies should take advantage of VISU by making a data request to utilise in their safety promotion and injury prevention work, wellbeing plans or other purposes. Report results are generally made available within two weeks, or sooner if urgent.
For more information, or to lodge a data request, see VISU’s website.