A Childhood Injury Data System is being developed at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Data will be collected on all children who are killed in Maryland or who are admitted to the Regional Pediatric Trauma Center or the Regional Burn Center. In addition, comparable data will be collected on a 10% systematic sample of all injured children admitted to hospitals in Maryland.

This will be the first systematic epidemiologic investigation of injured children admitted to hospitals in a given state or region. Previous studies of severe injuries have been limited to fatalities or to cases from a single hospital or metropolitan area. More than 6,000 injured children less than 16 years of age are admitted each year to general hospitals in Maryland. Yet in Maryland and other states, there is little or no information on the circumstances under which injury occurred, how the child was transported to the hospital, or the eventual outcome.

In the hope that other states will adopt similar systems for collecting data on serious childhood injuries, this paper will describe our method for developing a low-cost sampling system and preliminary data on children who have been killed or seriously injured in Maryland.