Information from injury data collections is widely used to formulate injury policy, evaluate injury prevention initiatives and to allocate resources to areas deemed a high priority. Obtaining quality data from injury surveillance is essential to ensure the appropriateness of these activities. This thesis seeks to develop a framework to assess the capacity of an injury data collection to perform injury surveillance and to use this framework to assess the capacity of both injury mortality and morbidity data collections in New South Wales (NSW) Australia to perform work-related or motor vehicle crash (MVC)-related injury surveillance. An Evaluation Framework for Injury Surveillance Systems (EFISS) was developed through a multi-staged process, using information from the literature to identify surveillance system characteristics, SMART criteria to assess the suitability of these characteristics to evaluate an injury data collection, and by obtaining feedback on the characteristics from a panel of surveillance experts using a two round modified Delphi study. At the conclusion of development, there were 18 characteristics, consisting of 5 data quality, 9 operational, and 4 practical characteristics, that were identified as important for inclusion within an EFISS. In addition, a rating system was created for the EFISS characteristics, based on available evidence and reasonable opinion. The evaluation of six injury data collections using the EFISS for their capacity to perform either work- or MVC-related injury surveillance illustrated the inability of any of the data collections to enumerate all cases of either work- or MVC-related injury mortality or morbidity in NSW or to capture all of the data considered necessary for work- or MVC-related injury surveillance. This evaluation has identified areas for improvement in all data collections and has demonstrated that for both work- and MVC-related injury surveillance that multiple collections should be reviewed to inform both work- and MVC-related policy development and injury prevention priority setting in NSW. The development of an EFISS has built upon existing evaluation guidelines for surveillance systems and provides an important step towards the creation of a framework specifically tailored to evaluate an injury data collection. Information obtained through an evaluation conducted using an EFISS would be useful for agencies responsible for injury data collections to identify where these collections could be improved to increase their usefulness for injury surveillance, and ultimately, for injury prevention.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258064 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Mitchell, Rebecca Jane, Public Health & Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, UNSW |
| Publisher | Publisher:University of New South Wales. Public Health & Community Medicine |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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