Burden of Sport Injuries in the European Union - Safety in Sports

9 Estimated health costs of sport injuries in the EU
9.1 Methodology
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9 | February 2012
Similar to the indicators for the burden of disease, cost estimates allow for rapid
comparisons of several diseases or groups of injuries. Cost estimates reflect also frequency
and severity by a joint measure indicating the health care needed. Moreover,
cost estimates provide the opportunity to show where and how much expenditures
might be saved, in particular through the reduction of frequency and severity of injuries
due to prevention programmes. In past years many cost-of-injuries studies have
been carried out and extensive knowledge about this approach has been gained (Van
Beek & Mulder 1998, Koffijberg et al. 1998).
Generally, two approaches can be distinguished. The first approach targets on expressing
all damages due to injuries in monetary terms: health care, rehabilitation,
damages to properties, loss of productivity due to sick leaves and disabilities, accident
annuities, disability annuities etc. The intention is to provide a comprehensive
estimate as accurate and complete as possible, in order to make aware that prevention
will pay off. Numerous models have been proposed, but comparable data from
EU member states for applying such comprehensive models are hardly achievable, or
only at high expenses. The second approach targets on cost estimates which can be
easier derived on the basis of routinely published data, in order to get comparable
data for various topics, countries or years at low costs. The second approach accepts
that such cost indicators reflect only parts of the true costs to societies, e.g. only the
direct health care costs.
In order to make injury costs internationally comparable, such a uniform method has
been developed in the framework of the so-called EUROCOST-project, which was cofunded
by the European Public Health Programme, based on treatments in hospitals
in EU member states. The method has been originally developed in the Netherlands
(Mulder et al 2002) and its application has been comprehensively described in the
final report on the EUROCOST project (Meerding et al. 2002, Polinder et al. 2004,
2005, 2007). In this report only the major characteristics of the method are referred.
The method uses an incidence-based approach, calculating the medical costs of injuries
occurring in a specific year. The incidence-based approach multiplies the incidence
of specific patient groups (defined by injury type and severity level, age and
sex) with the average costs of that patient group. Subsequently, the costs of all pa-