Data Sources

Data Sources

The Centre of Surveillance and Applied Research within the Public Health Agency of Canada provided the acute hospital separation data from their holdings of the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) Discharge Abstract Database (DAD). Records in DAD 2017/18 to 2019/20 with admission year in 2018 were included for extracting injury cases. In diagnoses, if a record had both significant ST diagnostic codes (S00-T79) and external cause codes (V01-Y36) following the ST codes, the record was defined as an injury case.

To obtain an estimate of provincial ED visits, a ratio of ED visits to hospitalizations for injury in Ontario was applied to each of the provinces in Atlantic Canada.

Death data was obtained from either the Vital Statistics Agency or the coroner services within each of the provinces in Atlantic Canada. Deaths by sex from Prince Edward Island were not available due to small number counts. In order to estimate the cost of deaths by sex, random numbers were assigned using the total counts within the age groups.

The external cause of injury for the death data was classified according to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision (ICD-10). Death data from New Brunswick was obtained from the Annual Coroner’s Report 2018 and was not classified using the ICD-10 classification but by the coroner death factor groupings.

Estimates of populations by age and sex for 2018 were obtained from Statistics Canada. See Reference Population.