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Given the large differences in the severity of injury which can exist, the most appropriate source to identify injuries will depend to some extent upon the severity of injury that you want to identify. If you want to evaluate injury deaths, appropriate sources would be death certificates and coroner's records, and not surveys. On the other hand if you want to identify self-treated injuries, then surveys are more appropriate, and systems based upon hospital records would be inappropriate.
Consider also that surveys provide information on people who have not been injured. Thus, giving you some assessment of exposure data. One drawback of injuries identified from medical records, is that you only know the risk factors for people who have injuries. You do not know how these factors may differ from the people who are not injured. This is a crucial point if you want to be able to identify events that places someone at risk for an injury and the importance of that risk. This is where the importance of analytical epidemiologic studies is recognized.

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