Injuries: secondary care

The ISD Unintentional Injuries Team provides detailed emergency admissions data on unintentional injuries for both adults and children in Scotland. A brief summary of this information is provided below.

  • In 2010/11, unintentional injuries accounted for approximately 1 in 7 of all emergency hospital admissions for children and 1 in 9 of all emergency hospital admissions for adults. (See section on emergency admissions for baseline data.)
  • Over the last ten years, the standardised emergency hospital discharge rate for unintentional injuries in adults and children has fallen steadily (Chart 1 (view chart)). UPDATE WHEN GET REVISED DATA
  • Thigh and lower leg/ankle fractures are the most common types of injury among adults and forearm fractures and head injuries are the most common types of injury for children.
  • Falls are the most common cause of injury in both adults and children, leading to an emergency admission
  • Children in the most deprived areas are nearly twice as likely to be admitted to hospital a as a result of unintentional injury as children in the least deprived areas.
  • Adults in the most deprived areas are over twice as likely to be admitted to hospital as a result of unintentional injury as adults in the least deprived areas.
  • Detailed local geography statistics on emergency hospital admissions for unintentional injuries are available via a section on the ISD website. This area provides a range of tables offering more in-depth information on unintentional injuries at various data levels, for example age group & sex (adults & children), NHS board, and community health partnership. Trend data is also provided.

IOBI have also carried out an analysis of inpatient admissions data for injuries and have compared European Age Standardised Rates across England, NIreland, Republic of Ireland, Scotland and Wales for all injury related emergency inpatient admissions, serious injury inpatient admissions and hip fracture injury inpatient admissions

Please note: If you require the most up-to-date data available, please check the data sources directly as new data may have been published since these data pages were last updated. Although we endeavour to ensure that the data pages are kept up-to-date, there may be a time lag between new data being published and the relevant ScotPHO web pages being updated.