A needle in a haystack: The use of routinely collected emergency department injury surveillance data to help identify physical child abuse

摘要: A retrospective, descriptive analysis of a sample children under 18 years presenting to hospital emergency department (ED) for treatment an injury was conducted. The aim explore characteristics and identify differences between assigned abuse codes unintentional using surveillance database. Only 0.1% had been the code 3.9% indicating possible abuse. Children 2-5 formed largest proportion those coded Superficial bruising were most common types seen in group (26.9% 18.8% respectively), whereas with likely present open wounds (18.4%). This study demonstrates that routinely collected data can be useful source information describing compared no codes.