The use of narrative text for injury surveillance research: a systematic review.

Objective: To summarise the extent to which narrative text fields in administrative health data are used to gather information about the event resulting in presentation to a health care provider for treatment of an injury, and to highlight best practise approaches to conducting narrative text interrogation for injury surveillance purposes.

Design: Systematic review.

Data Sources: Electronic databases searched included CINAHL, Google Scholar, Medline, Proquest, PubMed and PubMed Central.

The reliability of information on work-related injuries available from hospitalisation data in Australia.

Objective: To examine the reliability of work-related activity coding for injury-related hospitalisations in Australia.

Method: 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-related if they contained an ICD-10-AM work-related activity code (U73) allocated by either: (i) the original coder; (ii) an independent auditor, blinded to the original code; or (iii) a research assistant, blinded to both the original and auditor codes, who reviewed narrative text extracted from the medical record.