Epidemiology of spinal cord injury
A main goal of SwiSCI is to establish a reliable epidemiological database for SCI that may inform Swiss social and health policy regarding measures to prevent SCI as well as to anticipate the future demand for specialized health care.
To that purpose the study aims to provide reliable estimates of key epidemiological indicators related to mortality, morbidity and functioning for SCI and the demographic, geographic and other variation in relation to the health system in these statistics.
These indicators are instrumental in defining targets for prevention as well as building blocks necessary for describing the current and projecting the future SCI population in Switzerland. Stratification of projections by key defining characteristics will provide a basis for economists and other key health professionals to estimate the projected impact of SCI given different scenarios and will provide a foundation for defining goals and expectations at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. To quantify the net impact of SCI, SwiSCI further plans to perform standardized comparisons of morbidity and mortality outcomes between the SCI and the general population.