Fatality Estimates
NSC uses four sectors and three venues to categorize unintentional injuries. The four sectors are motor vehicle, work, home and public. Each sector represents an environment and an intervention route for injury prevention through a responsible authority such as a police department, an employer, a home owner or public health department. The three venues are transportation, work, and home and community.
Motor vehicle:
The motor vehicle sector can be identified by the underlying cause of death in the Selected Unintentional Injury Code Groupings table.
Work:
NSC adopted the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) figure, beginning with the 1992 data year, as the authoritative count of unintentional work-related deaths. The CFOI system is described in detail in the BLS Handbook of Methods.
The 2-Way Split:
After subtracting the motor vehicle and work figures from the unintentional injury total (ICD-10 codes V01-X59, Y85-Y86), the remainder belong to the home and public sectors. The home sector can be identified by the “place of occurrence” subclassification (code .0) used with most non-transport deaths; the public sector is the remainder. Missing “place of occurrence” information, however, prevents the direct determination of the home and public sector totals. Because of this, NSC allocates non-motor vehicle, non-work deaths into the home and public sectors based on the external cause, age group and cases with specified “place of occurrence.” This procedure, known as the 2-Way Split, uses the most recent death certificate data available from NCHS and CFOI for the same calendar year.
For each cause-code group and age group combination, the motor vehicle and work deaths are subtracted and the remainder, including those with “place of occurrence” unspecified, are allocated to home and public in the same proportion as those with “place of occurrence” specified.
The Selected Unintentional Injury Code Groupings table shows ICD-10 cause codes and CFOI event codes for the most common causes of unintentional injury death. The CFOI event codes (BLS, 1992) do not match exactly with ICD cause codes, so there is some error in the allocation of deaths among the classes.