Accident; analysis and prevention
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To assess the usefulness of collecting information on near miss and minor injuries for use in planning and evaluating injury prevention programmes for children aged under 5 years in the home environment. ⋯ Although the circumstances surrounding all the incident categories were similar, the numbers were too small to see whether specific injury mechanisms predict future injuries of the same type. It appeared that near miss and minor injuries are of limited use in predicting medically attended injuries, however this hypothesis needs to be tested on a much larger sample.
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The amount and type of burn injuries in The Netherlands are described using Surveillance Systems on treatments at an Accident and Emergency (A&E) department, hospital admissions and fatal injuries and a national survey (to asses treatments by a general practitioner). These data show an estimated 420 persons/year/100,000 inhabitants that are medically treated for burn injuries due to home and leisure accidents in The Netherlands. Fifty percent of all burn injuries concern scalds. ⋯ Clumsiness and inattention are major causes of injuries among young adults. Among the elderly, a quarter of all victims reported health problems or handicaps to be a cause of their injury. Based on the results of our analysis, preventive measures were suggested.