Citation

Smith LE. J. Saf. Res. 1994; 25(4): 221-227.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1994, U.S. National Safety Council, Publisher Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This study compared fire-related injuries from two ongoing data systems to determine how to combine them to provide improved estimates of U.S. residential fire-related injuries. National estimates and characteristics of patients treated in hospital emergency rooms for fire-related injuries were compared with injuries in a database of fires attended by the fire service. National estimates, age, and diagnosis distributions of injuries seen by both a hospital and the fire service were very similar in the two systems, indicating that the systems overlapped for this segment of injuries. Each system also contained a segment of fire-related injuries that was not included in the other. Combining the overlapping segment of injuries with segments that did not overlap resulted in an estimate of 45,000-47,000 U.S. fire-related injuries, the most com-prehensive estimate of U.S. residential fire-related injuries available to date.