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Abstract

Background: The current study examines what factors contribute to higher injury risk among Aboriginal peoples, compared to the total British Columbia (BC) population. We explore socioeconomic, geographic, and cultural factors, and combinations of these factors, that contribute to increased injury risk for Aboriginal peoples. This follows from our previously reported findings of improvements in injury risk over time for both the total and Aboriginal populations. Data and methods: We use provincial population-based linked health care databases of hospital discharge records. We identify three population groups: total BC population, and Aboriginal populations living off-reserve, or on-reserve. For each group we calculate age and gender-standardized relative risks (SRR) of injury-related hospitalization, relative to the total population of BC, for two 5-year time periods (1999–2003, and 2004–2008). We use custom data from the 2001 and 2006 long-form Censuses that described income, education, employment, housing conditions, proportion of urban dwellers, proportion of rural dwellers, and prevalence of Aboriginal ethnicity. We use multivariable linear regression to examine the associations between the census characteristics and SRR of injury. Results: The best-fitting model was an excellent fit (R2 = 0.905, p