Through popular notions of accidents and media interpretation of injuries, many people have a perception that mostly all injuries are deemed to be “accidents” and are therefore part of everyday life. However, what people don’t notice is that many of these injuries are preventable if certain regulations, laws, and practices are implemented. For instance, seat belt safety and the widening of roads have decreased the amount of motor vehicle crash and lessened the severity of motor vehicle related injuries.
Many people also don’t know the trends that occur or the statistics that relate to injury. A lot of this information had been mainly for academic or medical uses only, but not for the public. The public’s knowledge on injury is mainly grounded on the media and it’s representation of injuries. Using a Pediatric Trauma Database from 2007-2012 and a paper on Pediatric Trauma, I have compiled a plethora of graphs and charts that represent injuries, not as accidents, but as something that can be predictable and hopefully preventable.
INJURY DEMOGRAPHICS
The following graphs show a few demographics on how injuries affect different ethnicity, age, gender, and locations in Connecticut. In terms of ethnicity, people of white descent make up the majority of injury patients who are serviced at Connecticut’s Children Medical Center, followed by people who did not give a specific ethnicity. Followed by those groups are Hispanics, Blacks, and then Asians.
For age groups, interestingly, the majority of male patients are aged 5-9, but there is a decrease after the age of 9. For females however, there is an increase of injury patients during early and late adolescence. Overall however, males suffer from injuries more than females.
The next graph shows where the majority of injuries occur. There are more injuries that occur at home more than any other location. The next location where injuries occur the most are in recreational areas, such as parks. These injuries may include sport injuries, or anything involving physical activity.
This next graph focuses on the Injuries based on Mean age. This graph represents the most common injuries per mean age group. For instance as the title suggests, falls are the most common injury that patients come to the hospital for. Also, falls are more likely to happen to young children.
The next map shows the distribution of patients serviced at CCMC based on the patient’s home town. The majority of patients come from the immediate Hartford area, which is not surprising because CCMC is located in Hartford.
The following graphs represent injuries over time. In the first line graph, we can see that during the day, patients come in the hospital more frequently at night than the day. This does not mean that the patients had their injuries occur during the night, but it is possible that the majority of injuries do.
INJURY BASED ON TIME
During the day of the week Saturdays have the most injuries.
There are spikes in injuries during the spring and summer time
The next chart shows the trends of injury that occur over the years of 2007-2012. One trend to look out for is that sports injuries seem to happen early on in the year, whereas Falls increase during the months of May – August. This trend seems to be consistent for all years from 2007-2012. The last graph sums up all the patients from 2007-2012 into on graph to show the trend from five years.
Instructions for Motion Graph
In order to use this graph, you must change the X Axis to “Time” and the Y Axis to “Number”. Also on the right hand side, the user may change the size of the bubbles based on “Total number of Patients” to distinguish each bubble as it moves. The user can then press play to see patterns. Also the user may see changes through a bar graph or a line graph using the options on the top right.
Falls Increase During the Spring/Summer
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2007-2012
***Disregard the year, as it is only there for technical purposes only.