Home and leisure accidents in Europe: Survey and hospital data

Data on Home and Leisure Accidents (HLA) are collected in the Member States of the European Union. The data for the year under review (1996), collected by three countries in hospitals and by three countries via telephone interviews or household surveys, were analysed. The analysis was focused on the type of injury, mechanism of injury, place of occurrence and body part affected. The two different methods of data collection were found to lead to different results. Thus, collecting data by surveys leads to a realistic description of minor and severe injuries, while data collected in hospitals include a higher number of severe accidents. Due to the different methodology, a comparison of results between survey and hospital data is not possible.