Childhood Injury in Wake County, NC: Local Use of Public Health Surveillance Data

Abstract

Multiple sources of secondary data, including syndromic surveillance data, were used to describe leading causes of childhood injury in Wake County, NC. Injury intent and mechanism were categorized and rates were computed. We rank-ordered the top five injury mechanisms in each of three data sources and determined the top ten causes of childhood injury in Wake County. Timely and comprehensive ED visit data collected in NC DETECT proved invaluable to assessing local childhood injury causes. The ranking of childhood injury causes varied greatly between data sources, highlighting the importance of including a variety of data in a community health assessment.