James Edward Harrison

Flinders University · Research Centre for Injury Studies

Background A better understanding of how chronic physical health conditions affect long-term outcomes following injury is essential for quantifying the burden of serious orthopaedic injuries. We aimed to describe the association between the presence of post-injury chronic physical health conditions and (i) the change in health status from before in...

Background While injuries can impact on children’s educational achievements (with threats to their development and employment prospects), these risks are poorly quantified. This population-based longitudinal study investigated the impact of an injury-related hospital admission on Welsh children’s academic performance. Methods The Secure Anonymised...

Background Injury is a leading contributor to the global disease burden in children and places children at risk for adverse and lasting impacts on their health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and development. This study aimed to identify key predictors of HRQoL following injury in childhood and adolescence. Methods Data from 2259 injury survivors...

Background: Injury is a leading contributor to the global disease burden in children, affecting their health-related quality of life (HRQoL)-yet valid estimates of burden are absent. Methods: This study pooled longitudinal data from five cohort studies of pediatric injury survivors (5-17 years) at baseline, 1-, 4-, 6-, 12-, and 24- months (n = 2...

Objective: To explore how people with serious injuries returned to paid employment in the first 3-years after injury. Methods: Fifty-four adult survivors of serious injuries were interviewed at 3-years post-injury, all of whom had returned to work and were currently employed. A framework analysis approach was undertaken. Results: Participant d...

Objective To investigate trends in the incidence and causes of traumatic spinal cord injury (TSCI) in Victoria over a 10‐year period. Design, setting, participants Retrospective cohort study: analysis of Victorian State Trauma Registry (VSTR) data for people who sustained TSCIs during 2007–2016. Main outcomes and measures Temporal trends in popul...

Background Employment is an important marker of functional recovery from injury. There are few population-based studies of long-term employment outcomes, and limited data on the patterns of return to work post injury. Objectives This study sought to characterise patterns of engagement in work over the four-year period following major traumatic inj...

Objective This study aimed to describe road user behaviour, attitudes and crashes in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in four urban, regional and remote communities located in New South Wales (NSW) and South Australia (SA). Methods Face-to-face surveys were administered to clients (n=625) in Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Servi...

Aim: Persistent disability following traumatic injuries can disrupt future plans and create uncertainty about how to mitigate future impacts. It is unknown how or whether perceptions of the future change in the years after injury. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore trauma survivors’ perceptions of their future over time. Methods: A lon...

Employment is an important marker of functional recovery from injury. There are few population-based studies of long-term employment outcomes, and limited data on the patterns of return to work post injury. This study sought to characterise patterns of engagement in work over the four-year period following major traumatic injury, and to identify fa...

Introduction Traumatic injury is a leading contributor to the global disease burden in children and adolescents, but methods used to estimate burden do not account for differences in patterns of injury and recovery between children and adults. A lack of empirical data on postinjury disability in children has limited capacity to derive valid disabil...

https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/injury/spinal-cord-injury-australia-2008-09/contents/table-of-contents

Objective: To characterize patterns of engagement in work during the 4-year period after major traumatic injury, and to identify factors associated with those patterns. Background: Employment is an important marker of functional recovery from injury. There are few population-based studies of long-term employment outcomes, and limited data on the...

Objective: To assess the utility of the proposed World Health Organization (WHO)'s International Classification of Disease (ICD) framework for classifying patient safety events. Setting: Independent classification of 45 clinical vignettes using a web-based platform. Study participants: The WHO's multi-disciplinary Quality and Safety Topic Advi...

Background: Improved understanding of the quality of survival of patients is crucial in evaluating trauma care, understanding recovery patterns and timeframes, and informing healthcare, social, and disability service provision. We aimed to describe the longer-term health status of seriously injured patients, identify predictors of outcome, and est...

Objective: Low rates of driver licensing have been linked to increased risk of transport-related injury, and reduced access to health services, employment and educational opportunities in the Aboriginal population. This paper reports on how barriers to obtaining a driver licence are being addressed in four Aboriginal communities in New South Wales...

Objective To create patient-based disability weights for individual injury diagnosis codes and nature-of-injury classifications, for use, as an alternative to panel-based weights, in studies on the burden of disease. Methods Self-reported data based on the EQ-5D standardized measure of health status were collected from 29 770 participants in the I...

Background: Existing administrative data patient safety indicators (PSIs) have been limited by uncertainty around the timing of onset of included diagnoses. Objective: We undertook de novo PSI development through a data-driven approach that drew upon "diagnosis timing" information available in some countries' administrative hospital data. Resea...

Background Disability weights (DWs) are an integral part of deriving the years lived with disability (YLD) component of disability adjusted life years (DALYs). DWs can be derived through different methods including panels comprising of experts, the general population judging the impact of conditions on loss of health, or through follow-up data on t...

Background The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is the most widely used classification of injuries and their external causes, particularly in vital registers of deaths and systems to report on cases admitted to hospitals. The ICD has been revised 10 times, most recently in the late 1980s. The World Health Organisation (WHO) is conduct...

Background There is a worldwide shortage of population data about non-fatal injury burden. The aim of this population-based, nested, longitudinal study was to quantify patient outcomes in the first 5 years after injury. Methods Adult (>17 years), major trauma patients registered by the population-based Victorian State Trauma Registry, injured betw...

Background Driver licensing is essential to effective road safety management systems however strengthened graduated driver licensing systems may make licensing less accessible. The impact of barriers to licensing can be far reaching, particularly for already marginalised groups. We aimed to describe licensing rates and factors associated with drive...

Background The path to recovery following major trauma can involve a long trajectory of complex health care needs and multiple interactions with health professions. We explored the perspectives of seriously injured patients regarding issues that arise during their interactions with health providers. Methods This qualitative study, nested within a...

Objective: Education, employment and equitable access to services are commonly accepted as important underlying social determinants of health. For most Australians, access to health, education and other services is facilitated by private transport and a driver licence. This study aimed to examine licensing rates and predictors of licensing in a sam...

Quad bikes are a leading cause of death and serious injury on Australian farms. This study provides important insights regarding quad bike use and the circumstances surrounding incidents that occur as a result of their use. It also identifies high risk uses and examines the severity and type of injury sustained by quad bike riders. This was achieve...

Objective: To describe the long-term outcomes of major trauma patients and factors associated with the rate of recovery. Background: As injury-related mortality decreases, there is increased focus on improving the quality of survival and reducing nonfatal injury burden. Methods: Adult major trauma survivors to discharge, injured between July 2...

The World Health Organization (WHO) plans to submit the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) to the World Health Assembly in 2018. The WHO is working toward a revised classification system that has an enhanced ability to capture health concepts in a manner that reflects current scientific evidence and that is compatib...

Background Burden of disease and injury methods can be used to summarise and compare the effects of conditions in terms of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Burden estimation methods are not inherently complex. However, as commonly implemented, the methods include complex modelling and estimation. Objectives To provide a simple and open-sourc...

Comparing health-related quality of life (HRQL) outcomes between studies is difficult due to the wide variety of instruments used. Comparing study outcomes and facilitating pooled data analyses requires valid "crosswalks" between HRQL instruments. Algorithms exist to map 12-item Short Form Health Survey (SF-12) responses to EQ-5D item responses and...

Background The impact of major trauma can pervade all aspects of an injured person’s life. Many experience enduring changes in their transport routine, as ongoing disability is evident two years post injury. Little information is available about the considerations shaping, and consequences of, trauma survivors’ selection and use of transport over t...

We assessed the quality of Global Burden of Disease-2010 (GBD-2010) estimates of road injury deaths by comparing with government statistics for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries that report to the International Road Traffic Accident Database (IRTAD). We obtained tabulated data for 25 OECD countries that report...

To determine associations between the number of injuries sustained and three measures of disability 12-months post-injury for hospitalised patients. Data from 27,840 adult (18+ years) participants, hospitalised for injury, were extracted for analysis from the Validating and Improving injury Burden Estimates (Injury-VIBES) Study. Modified Poisson an...

Background: Traumatic spinal cord injury is a devastating condition impacting adversely on the health and wellbeing, functioning and independence, social participation and quality of life of the injured person. In Australia, there are approximately 15 new cases per million population per year; economic burden estimates suggest 2 billion dollars an...

Background Traumatic injury is a leading contributor to the overall global burden of disease. However, there is a worldwide shortage of population data to inform understanding of non-fatal injury burden. An improved understanding of the pattern of recovery following trauma is needed to better estimate the burden of injury, guide provision of rehabi...

Hospitalised injuries in older Australians 2011–12 this report focuses on the most frequent causes of hospitalisations due to injury sustained by australians, aged 65 years or older, during the period 1 july 2011 to 30 june 2012. Whilst the vast majority of hospitalisations were due to falls, the report focuses on other injuries (such as unintentio...

The application of disability weights by nature of injury is central to the calculation of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Such weights should represent injury diagnosis groups that demonstrate homogeneity in disability outcomes. Existing classifications have not used empirical data in their development to inform groups that are homogeneous...

The International Statistical Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10)-based Injury Severity Score (ICISS) performs well but requires diagnosis-specific survival probabilities (DSPs), which are empirically derived, for its calculation. The objective was to examine if DSPs based on data pooled from several countries could increase accuracy...

The UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 calls on national governments in sub-Saharan Africa and worldwide to direct substantial resources to stem the increasing burden of road traffic injuries. Bringing such attention to road safety requires demonstrating the importance of the problem relative to other major threats that currently confront...

Background: Measurement of the global burden of disease with disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) requires disability weights that quantify health losses for all non-fatal consequences of disease and injury. There has been extensive debate about a range of conceptual and methodological issues concerning the definition and measurement of these we...

This paper outlines the approach that the WHO's Family of International Classifications (WHO-FIC) network is undertaking to create ICD-11. We also outline the more focused work of the Quality and Safety Topic Advisory Group, whose activities include the following: (i) cataloguing existing ICD-9 and ICD-10 quality and safety indicators; (ii) reviewi...

Priority setting, identification of unmet and changing healthcare needs, service and policy planning, and the capacity to evaluate the impact of health interventions requires valid and reliable methods for quantifying disease and injury burden. The methodology developed for the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies has been adopted to estimate the...

Abstract Background Understanding the factors that impact on disability is necessary to inform trauma care and enable adequate risk adjustment for benchmarking and monitoring. A key consideration is how to adjust for pre-existing conditions when assessing injury outcomes, and whether the inclusion of comorbidity is needed in addition to adjustment...

Background: Reliable and timely information on the leading causes of death in populations, and how these are changing, is a crucial input into health policy debates. In the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010 (GBD 2010), we aimed to estimate annual deaths for the world and 21 regions between 1980 and 2010 for 235 causes...

Background: Non-fatal health outcomes from diseases and injuries are a crucial consideration in the promotion and monitoring of individual and population health. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies done in 1990 and 2000 have been the only studies to quantify non-fatal health outcomes across an exhaustive set of disorders at the global and re...

Background: Measuring disease and injury burden in populations requires a composite metric that captures both premature mortality and the prevalence and severity of ill-health. The 1990 Global Burden of Disease study proposed disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) to measure disease burden. No comprehensive update of disease burden worldwide incorp...

Background Measurement of the global burden of disease with disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) requires disability weights that quantify health losses for all non-fatal consequences of disease and injury. There has been extensive debate about a range of conceptual and methodological issues concerning the defi nition and measurement of these wei...

Background Measurement of the global burden of disease with disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) requires disability weights that quantify health losses for all non-fatal consequences of disease and injury. There has been extensive debate about a range of conceptual and methodological issues concerning the defi nition and measurement of these wei...

Background Measurement of the global burden of disease with disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) requires disability weights that quantify health losses for all non-fatal consequences of disease and injury. There has been extensive debate about a range of conceptual and methodological issues concerning the definition and measurement of these weig...

To describe rates of hospitalization for head and traumatic brain injury (TBI) among Australian adults aged 15-24 years. Descriptive analysis of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare National Hospital Morbidity Database, using data from 1 July 2000 to 30 June 2006. The rate of hospitalization for head injury was 618.5 per 100 000, with 148...

Abstract: Increasing demand for health resources remains a global challenge. Valid and reliable methods for quantifying disease and injury burden are essential to guide the public health response to identify unmet needs, inform priority setting, develop appropriate policy, plan health services, and to monitor the impact of interventions. The 1990 G...

The value of measuring the population burden of fatal and nonfatal injury is well established. Population health metrics are important for assessing health status and health-related quality of life after injury and for integrating mortality, disability, and quality-of-life consequences. A frequently used population health metric is the disability-a...

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is used to categorize diseases, injuries, and external causes of injury, and it is a key epidemiologic tool enabling storage and retrieval of data from health and vital records to produce core international mortality and morbidity statistics. The ICD is updated periodically to ensure the classifica...

Injury is a leading cause of the global burden of disease (GBD). Estimates of non-fatal injury burden have been limited by a paucity of empirical outcomes data. This study aimed to (i) establish the 12-month disability associated with each GBD 2010 injury health state, and (ii) compare approaches to modelling the impact of multiple injury health st...

Collecting population data on sensitive issues such as non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is problematic. Case note audits or hospital/clinic based presentations only record severe cases and do not distinguish between suicidal and non-suicidal intent. Community surveys have largely been limited to school and university students, resulting in little mu...

OBJECTIVE: To assess the availability and quality of global death registration data used for estimating injury mortality. METHODS: The completeness and coverage of recent national death registration data from the World Health Organization mortality database were assessed. The quality of data on a specific cause of injury death was judged high if fe...

The International Classification of Diseases Injury Severity Score (ICISS) has been proposed as an International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10-based alternative to mortality prediction tools that use Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) data, including the Trauma and Injury Severity Score (TRISS). To date, studies have not examined the performance...

To understand self-injury and its correlates in the Australian population. Cross-sectional survey, using computer-assisted telephone interview, of a representative sample of 12,006 Australians from randomly selected households. Data on demographics, self-injury, psychiatric morbidity, substance use, suicidality, disclosure and help-seeking. In the...

To assess the availability and quality of global death registration data used for estimating injury mortality. The completeness and coverage of recent national death registration data from the World Health Organization mortality database were assessed. The quality of data on a specific cause of injury death was judged high if fewer than 20% of deat...

To model the population level impact of tai-chi on future rates of falls and fall-related injury in older people as a tool for policy development. An epidemiological and economic model for estimating population-level effectiveness of tai-chi. Australia, 2009. Patients or subjects Australian community-dwelling population aged 70+ years, ambulatory a...

Worldwide, current practice is to report hospital mortality using the hospital standardised mortality ratio (HSMR). An HSMR is generated by comparing an indirectly standardised expected mortality rate against a hospital's observed mortality rate. A hospital's HSMR can be compared with the overall outcomes for all hospitals in a population, or with...

Rates of serious injury due to falls in some Australian jurisdictions appear to have increased over time despite a reduction in the rate of hospitalised hip fracture (eg, Dowling & Finch 2009). The Australian Institute of Health and Welfares National Injury Surveillance Unit has undertaken analysis of national rates of hospitalised fall injuries fo...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of disability in all regions of the globe. The global incidence rate of TBI is estimated at 200 per 100 000 people per year; however, this rate is uncertain and a likely underestimate. The Injury Expert Group within the Global Burden of Disease 2005 (GBD) Project aims to provide better estimates of th...

The Injury Expert Group within the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2005 project aimed to estimate incidence and prevalence rates, and duration of impact for 30 specified injuries and 12 external causes of injury. The aim of both the GBD and the Injury Expert Group is to develop estimates for each of the 21 global regions that are as valid as possibl...

National vital registration systems that record causes of death do not exist in most African countries. This makes estimating incidence of mortality from injuries in African regions particularly challenging. We discuss the viability of using retrospective and prospective data gathered from death registration sites that issue death certificates for...

Background The ICD-based Injury Severity Score (ICISS) provides a criterion for selecting severe injuries, useful when reporting trends in injury incidence because less affected by extraneous factors than total hospitalised cases. We assessed the relative performance of some variants of ICISS.Method Records from the Australian National Hospital Mor...

Reliable estimates of the burden of injuries are essential inputs for prioritising prevention strategies. While population-based injury surveillance is the best source for such information, it is recognised that these systems do not exist in many countries. Thus, we conducted an environmental scan of data sources that can be used to estimate the in...

To describe the rates of hospitalisation for head and traumatic brain injury among Australian children aged 0-14 years. Descriptive analysis of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare National Hospital Morbidity Database, using data for the period 1 July 2000 to 30 June 2006. The rate of hospitalisation for head injury was 395.9 per 100,000...

Publication deadlines for reporting causes of deaths not yet finalised by coroners and different methods employed by different jurisdictions may have disguised Australia's true suicide rate

Suicide and intentional self-harm are issues of major importance in public health and public policy, with rates widely used as progress indicators in these areas. Accurate statistics are vital for appropriately targeted prevention strategies and research, costing of suicide and to combat associated stigma. Underreporting of Australian suicide rates...

Work-related injuries in Australia are estimated to cost around $57.5 billion annually, however there are currently insufficient surveillance data available to support an evidence-based public health response. Emergency departments (ED) in Australia are a potential source of information on work-related injuries though most ED's do not have an 'Acti...

Objective: To quantify the extent to which alcohol related injuries are adequately identified in hospitalisation data using ICD-10-AM codes indicative of alcohol involvement. Method: A random sample of 4373 injury-related hospital separations from 1 July 2002 to 30 June 2004 were obtained from a stratified random sample of 50 hospitals across 4 sta...

An end-user response survey and assessments of inter-rater reliability before and after training. Evaluate the spinal cord injury (SCI) application of the international classification of external cause of injury (ICECI) in a mixed group of untrained and trained coders to assess agreement, refine coding and training methodology. An interactive codin...

To examine the reliability of work-related activity coding for injury-related hospitalisations in Australia. A random sample of 4,373 injury-related hospital separations from 1 July 2002 to 30 June 2004 were obtained from a stratified random sample of 50 hospitals across four states in Australia. From this sample, cases were identified as work-rela...

Population modelling holds considerable promise for identifying the most efficient and cost-effective falls prevention measures, but the outcomes need to be in a readily useable form. This paper describes an iterative, collaborative process undertaken by researchers and falls prevention policy officers to develop such a format for falls prevention...

To assess extent of coder agreement for external causes of injury using ICD-10-AM for injury-related hospitalisations in Australian public hospitals. A random sample of 4850 discharges from 2002 to 2004 was obtained from a stratified random sample of 50 hospitals across four states in Australia. On-site medical record reviews were conducted and ext...

To compare the incidence of injury-related hospitalisations and the injury profiles for interpersonal violence, in the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations of Australia. Descriptive analysis of the National Hospital Morbidity Database (NHMD), using data for the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland for the perio...

Mohammed and colleagues doubt the value of hospital standardised mortality ratios.1 They describe a possibility of increased bias consequent on a “constant risk fallacy” occurring if the effects of risk factors used in model adjustment process are assumed to be constant across hospitals in the subsequent hospital grouping, when they are not. Using...

Suicide and intentional self-harm are issues of major importance in public health and public policy, with rates widely used as progress indicators in these areas. Accurate statistics are vital for appropriately targeted prevention strategies and research, costing of suicide and to combat associated stigma. Underreporting of Australian suicide rates...

To appraise the published evidence regarding the accuracy of external cause-of-injury codes in hospital records. Systematic review. Electronic databases searched included PubMed, PubMed Central, Medline, CINAHL, Academic Search Elite, Proquest Health and Medical Complete, and Google Scholar. Snowballing strategies were used by searching the bibliog...

To describe the causes of death codes assigned in Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) mortality data to deaths in Australia from 2000 to 2005 that were coded as intentional self-harm (suicide) in the National Coroners Information System (NCIS). Data for deaths in the period mid-2000 to end-2005 were obtained from the National Coroners Information...

Kavi Bhalla and colleagues invite individuals and organizations to provide local injury data sources to help inform estimates of the global burden of injuries.

To characterise injuries sustained in basketball and netball that result in hospital admission and to compare the profiles of injury between the two sports. Population-based retrospective descriptive epidemiological study using data from the National Hospital Morbidity Database, July 2000 to June 2004. Patients discharged from a public or private h...

To describe rates of hospitalisation for head injury due to assault among Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Secondary analysis of routinely collected hospital morbidity data for 42,874 inpatients at public and private hospitals in Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory for the 6-year period 1 July 1999--3...

To examine the relationship between Australian workers' patterns of alcohol consumption and absenteeism. A secondary analysis of the 2001 National Drug Strategy Household Survey data. Australia 2001. A total of 13 582 workers aged >or=14 years. Alcohol consumption levels associated with National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) guideline...

To (a) quantify the lethality of suicide methods used in Australia in the period 1 July 1993 to 30 June 2003, (b) examine method-specific case fatality by age and sex, and (c) identify changes in case fatality during the study period. Two sources of data on episodes of self-harm in Australia were used, mortality and hospital separation data. Double...