A new interactive online tool has been developed by the Victorian Injury Surveillance Unit (VISU) at Monash University that provides unprecedented access to injury data in Victoria.
The VISU Injury Atlas of Victoria is a window into 2006-17 hospital data sourced from the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services.
The burden of unintentional injuries can be visualised in maps showing the number of hospital admissions by local government areas, while charts can be created for injury causes by age group, gender and body region.
The VISU Injury Atlas of Victoria aims to easier translate injury data into practice, and spur injury prevention and safety promotion programs for the benefit of local communities.
The interactive online tool is expected to be utilised by state and local government agencies, health and injury prevention organisations, media, business and industry, education institutes, researchers and the community.
“We’ve been analysing, interpreting and disseminating data on injury deaths, hospital admissions and emergency department presentations in Victoria for over 25 years,” said VISU’s director, Associate Professor Janneke Berecki-Gisolf.
“We’re pleased to make this particular data available to the general public and our stakeholders in a unique, user-friendly way that has the ability to be an important research and planning tool.”
The VISU Injury Atlas of Victoria offers hospital admission data on unintentional injuries (such as falls, drowning, transport, poisoning, etc.), including a dedicated focus on sports injuries.
Key technical features of the software include the ability to:
- explore unintentional injury and sports injury data for the years 2006-17 extracted from the Victorian Admitted Episodes dataset, in the unintentional injury atlas and sports injury atlas;
- explore injury data by selected causes, age groups, gender, body region injured, place of injury, bed days and year of hospital admission;
- visualise the injury data in tables, maps and graphs as counts, proportions or rates per 100,000 people where applicable; and
