ArticleInjury epidemiology2023
Self-harm emergency department visits in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from a sentinel surveillance system.
Article in Injury epidemiology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Gender disparities in hospital admission patterns during the COVID-19 health emergency: a systematic review.BMC public health · 2026Pooled it
- Mental health of Canadian youth: A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies examining changes in depression, anxiety, and suicide-related outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic.Canadian journal of public health = Revue canadienne de sante publique · 2024Pooled it
- Trends in Canadian Suicide Mortality by Age and Sex From 2000 to 2024: Tendances en matière de mortalité attribuable au suicide au Canada selon l'âge et le sexe, de 2000 à 2024.Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie · 2026Article
- Race/ethnicity on firearm & self-injuries during COVID-19 using TQIP data.Surgery open science · 2026Article
- Trends in self-harm visits to the emergency department among children and youth before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Alberta: An interrupted time series analysis.Paediatrics & child health · 2026Article
- Application of Machine Learning to Auto-Code Injury Data in the e-CHIRPP System: Development and Evaluation Study.Online journal of public health informatics · 2025Article
- Suicide among youth and young adults in Canada: bereaved parents' perspectives on the systems of care.International journal of mental health systems · 2025Article
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4 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
backgroundSelf-harm is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality globally, though the prevalence tends to be highest among adolescents. As an indicator in suicide surveillance, the incidence of self-harm is useful because it is sensitive to social, environmental, and economic conditions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the epidemiology of self-harm has varied across contexts. This study aims to investigate the changes in self-harm emergency department visits in 2020 compared to a pre-pandemic period in 2018-2019.
methodsSelf-harm emergency department visits were extracted from the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program database from 2018 to 2020. We compared the data in 2020 with the pre-pandemic baseline in 2018-2019. We examined the changes in volume, the percentages of self-harm cases among all intentional injuries by sex, age group, and the proportions of self-harm cases by method of injury. We also quantified the time trends of the percentages of self-harm cases among all intentional injuries using Joinpoint regression.
resultsThe overall volume of emergency visits related to self-harm was higher in 2020 during weeks 24-51 compared to the average volumes for the same weeks of 2018-2019. Percentage of self-harm among all intentional injury emergency department visits was significantly higher by 6.1% among females (p < 0.05) and by 5.3% among males in 2020 than in 2018-2019 (p < 0.05). The 11-to-18-year age group showed an increase in the percentage of self-harm among all intentional injury emergency department visits by 7.4% in 2020 when compared to 2018-2019. Time trend analyses showed that the percentages of self-harm among all intentional injury emergency department visits were higher during weeks 4-52 in 2020 than in 2018-2019, for both males and females.
conclusionsThe percentage of emergency department visits related to self-harm among all intentional injury visits were higher during 2020 than in 2018-2019. These results underscore the importance of continued surveillance of self-harm in Canada to better understand the sociodemographic factors affecting self-harm and to inform the prevention strategies and policies.
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