In this issue

The NaReS Project: A new dimension for CHIRPP

Letter of introduction

Use of CHIRPP data at l'Hôpital de l'Enfant-Jésus

Childhood injury: Deaths and hospitalizations in Canada

Welcoming the Kingston and Region Injury Surveillance Program

New directory of injury prevention programs

Hospitals participating in CHIRPP as of March 1994

CHIRPP meetings held in Ottawa

The CHIRPP Sampler: Frequency of encounters, by age group and sex

Welcome to CHIRPP News

Issue 1

March 1994

The NaReS Project: A new dimension for CHIRPP

The 10 children's hospitals in Canada were CHIRPP's initial participants. Data on injury were collected from the emergency rooms of these hospitals beginning in 1990. Three years later, CHIRPP had grown to include the emergency rooms of five general hospitals. Thus, data from injuries to adults as well as to children have become part of the database. Now, CHIRPP is part of a project to capture information outside of emergency rooms from physicians' offices.

CHIRPP is collaborating for one year with the National Research System (NaReS) of the College of Family Physicians of Canada in the Canadian Family Physician Childhood Injury Study. NaReS is a national primary care research network of family physicians who volunteer their time to participate in research projects having clinical relevance. It has recruited close to 200 urban and rural physicians to gather information about injury to children as seen in their offices. Urban physicians were recruited from cities that participate in CHIRPP, and rural physicians were recruited from the provinces that participate in CHIRPP, and where possible, from communities with a population of less than 5,000 and no hospital. The data collection periods for the study are the first 10 working days of November 1993, February 1994, May 1994 and July 1994.

The one-page data collection form is almost identical to the CHIRPP questionnaire. In other words, the same sort of information about the patient and about the circumstances and nature of the injury is being collected, but in a different setting. This will enable comparisons to be made that had not been possible before. Specifically, the study will show the number of childhood injuries seen by family physicians compared with the number seen at hospital emergency departments, the proportion of different types of injuries presenting at physicians' offices versus those presenting at hospital emergency departments, and the number of different types of injuries seen by family physicians in urban areas compared with those seen by family physicians in rural communities without an emergency department.

The Bureau of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, of which CHIRPP is a part, and NaReS will produce a final report documenting the methodology of the study, a summary of results, discussion of results, and conclusions.

The four CHIRPP data entry clerks (from left to right) Ronalda Francis, Lynda Schenk, Nicole Courville and Lily Chinery together code and input data from about 7,800 CHIRPP forms per month. Each record contains 44 fields. As of March 1, 1994 there were 282,037 records in the CHIRPP database.

[Table of Contents] [Next]