Nine out of ten injuries caused by accidents

Nine out of ten injuries due to accidents.Photo: Heiko Junge / SCANPIX

Falls and clashes or collisions are the causes for seven out of ten injuries,  a recent overview shows.

More than nine out of ten injuries that were treated in hospitals and emergency services last year, was due to accidents. The rest of the injuries were mostly caused by violence and assault and self-harm.
Most of the injuries were less serious, but there are more serious accidents among older people, , according to the report Injury Data from 2015. Falling was the cause of almost 85 percent of the injuries in the elderly over 80 years old.

A little more than 131,000 incidents of injury  were reported last year. However, a large number of incidents of injury seem to go unreported, and figures from the specialist health service reveals that 305 000 incidents of injury  were treated. That means that health services have only information about the circumstances surrounding the 42 percent of the incidents of injury.
This overview also does not cover the injury data for patients who received help from the family doctor or others in primary health care, .
The goal of the reporting system is to gain more knowledge about the circumstances surrounding and the causes of the injuries so that it will be easier to work more targeted to prevent injuries.

11,000 injured at work
Most of the injuries occurred in residential areas or in traffic. But almost 11,000 injuries happened in work situations-mostly to people in the construction business and the manufacturing industries.
More than six out of ten of the reported injuries occured to people under 40 years of age. Injuries caused by violence or assault occurred most often in the age group 20-39 years.

 

Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today