Circumstances of Trauma and Accidents in Children: A Thesaurus-based Survey

Introduction : Injuries and accidents are major causes of morbidity and mortality in children in France. Identification and description of the mechanisms of accidents are essential to develop adapted prevention methods. For this purpose, a specific thesaurus of ICD-10 codes relating to the circumstances of trauma and accidents in children was created in the French Loire department. The objective of this study was to evaluate the relevance and acceptability of the thesaurus in the pediatric emergency unit of Saint-Etienne university hospital.Material and Methods : This study was conducted in two phases. The first, longitudinal phase was conducted over three periods between May and October 2014 to compare codings by emergency room physicians before using the thesaurus with those defined on the basis of the thesaurus. The second phase retrospectively compared coding in July and August 2014 before introduction of the thesaurus with thesaurus-based coding in July and August 2015.Results : The first phase showed a loss of more than half of the information without the thesaurus. The circumstances of trauma can be described by an appropriate code in more than 90% of cases. The second phase showed a 13% increase in coding of the circumstances of trauma, which nevertheless remains insufficient.Discussion : The thesaurus facilitates coding and generally meets the coding physician’s expectations and should be used in large-scale epidemiological surveys.