In 2001, there were 23,380 discharges of Kentucky residents from licensed, acute-care hospitals in Kentucky as a result of injury - an average of 64 per day. Of these, 78% included an external cause of injury code (E-code) on the discharge record. Among the E-coded discharges, 84% stated that the injury was unintentional, 9% that it was self-inflicted, and 3.4% that it was the result of an assault. Forty-one percent specified an unintentional fall as the cause of injury, 19% an unintentional motor vehicle traffic crash, and 8% a self-inflicted poisoning. As a group, these three causes accounted for more than two-thirds (68%) of all cases. The leading causes and their relative frequencies varied, however, according to age group, as noted in the second table below.

The tables below provide an overview of injury-related hospitalizations for 2001 by mechanism and manner of injury, and by age group. More detailed information will be posted in the coming months on the Injury Data portion of this site.

Notes: The data source is the Kentucky state inpatient hospital discharge database (HDD), which is administered by the Kentucky Hospital Association. The Kentucky HDD does not capture discharges of patients hospitalized in facilities outside of Kentucky. We defined an injury-related hospitalization in accordance with the State and Territorial Injury Prevention Directors' Association guidelines. This definition is generally considered a conservative one, since it is based solely on the patient's principal diagnosis. It may underrepresent the true numbers of discharges that were related to injury, but we can say with confidence that there were at least this many.