An evaluation of injury surveillance system and 19 external causes of injury from the standard health information, Ministry of Public Health, Thailand

Abstract

An evaluation of injury Surveillance System (IS) and 19 external causes of injury from the standard health information are a main activity of an injury surveillance unit, Bureau of Epidemiology. The IS has been implemented since 1992 and currently expands a network of surveillance in large hospitals across 33 sites. For 19 external causes of injury from the standard health information, Bureau of Epidemiology has developed since 2014 followed by the Ministry of Public Health policy. An evaluation is an important activity to determine the quality of the data. Use data effectively can provide a solution for injury problem in Thailand. The retrospective data between November 9, 2014 and February 8, 2015 of the IS of the Maharaj Nakhon Si Thammarat hospital were retrieved. Three community hospitals were included into the study by collecting the retrospective data of the 19 external causes of injury from the standard health information between October 1 and December 31, 2014. The study aimed to evaluate the quality of the IS and the 19 external causes of injury information at a provincial level and a district level in completeness, accuracy and timeliness to improve the efficiency of the surveillance. The Maharaj Nakhon Si Thammarat hospital had more coverage on the IS when compared to the hospital database. There was a reason for this result. If the patients admitted to the hospital with a co-morbidity of internal medicine and injury, only clinical signs from internal medicine were recorded into the hospital database. The injury data might be loss from the database. The timely reporting of the ISWIN program was 98.8%, the completeness of reporting showed between 96.1% and 100% and the accuracy of 22 variables showed between 88.9% and 100%. The completeness of coding was between 94.5% and 100%, the validity of giving the code showed between 91.2% and 100%, the completeness of data entry showed between 96.7 and 100 and the accuracy of data entry showed between 94% and 100%.
The 19 external causes of injury from the standard health information from three community hospitals had coverage of report when compared to the diagnostic database of hospital at 85.5%, the accidental database of hospital (45.6%), the diagnostic database of the provincial public health office (64.0%) and the accidental database of the provincial public health office (31.6%). The timeliness of reporting in November and December were 66.66%.