Abstract
BackgroundMedico-legal death investigations are a recognised data source for public health endeavours and its accessibility has increased following the development of electronic data systems. Despite time and cost savings, the strengths and limitations of this method and impact on research findings remain untested. This study examines this issue using the National Coronial Information System (NCIS).MethodsPubMed, ProQuest and Informit were searched to identify publications where the NCIS was used as a data source for research published during the period 2000–2014. A descriptive analysis was performed to describe the frequency and characteristics of the publications identified. A content analysis was performed to identify the nature and impact of strengths and limitations of the NCIS as reported by researchers.ResultsOf the 106 publications included, 30 reported strengths and limitations, 37 reported limitations only, seven reported strengths only and 32 reported neither. The impact of the reported strengths of the NCIS was described in 14 publications, whilst 46 publications discussed the impacts of limitations. The NCIS was reported to be a reliable source of quality, detailed information with comprehensive coverage of deaths of interest, making it a powerful injury surveillance tool. Despite these strengths, researchers reported that open cases and missing information created the potential for selection and reporting biases and may preclude the identification and control of confounders.ConclusionsTo ensure research results are valid and inform health policy, it is essential to consider and seek to overcome the limitations of data sources that may have an impact on results.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12961-016-0096-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Medico-legal death investigations are a recognised data source for public health endeavours and its accessibility has increased following the development of electronic data systems
Historically, the primary role of death investigation agencies was to inform the criminal justice system to establish whether the actions or inactions of another person had contributed to the death [1]
Study description Journals The majority of studies were published in Australia (41/ 106, 38.7%) and the United Kingdom (34/106, 32.1%), most commonly in the fields of occupational health and safety (28/106, 26.4%) and medicine (26/106, 24.5%) (Table 1)
Summary
Medico-legal death investigations are a recognised data source for public health endeavours and its accessibility has increased following the development of electronic data systems. Bugeja et al Health Research Policy and Systems (2016) 14:28 The richness of this population-based data makes medicolegal death investigation material a valuable data source for preventive medicine [5]. These data assume a wider use, enabling researchers to examine the nature, distribution and determinants of preventable deaths, and the effects of interventions [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. It is more detailed and accurate than death certificates or police reports, and circumvents the need for extensive manual searches followed by review of all hard copy documents to identify cases and extract the information of interest [13, 20, 21]
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