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Objectives: Counts of mortality and morbidity based on routinely collected national datasets have undercounted Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. To correct for the undercount, when estimating fatal and serious non-fatal injury incidence, the 'ever-Māori' method has been used. This study sought to determine how well the ever-Māori method corrects for the undercount., Methods: Trends in frequencies and age-standardised rates for fatal injury indicators were compared using: (a) ever-Māori classification; (b) New Zealand Census Mortality Study adjustment ratios applied to Total Māori counts from the Mortality Collection; and (c) Total Māori counts from the Mortality Collection. For serious non-fatal injury, trends using ever-Māori were compared with Total Māori from hospital discharge data., Results: The absolute number of injuries attributable to Māori varied depending on the method used to adjust for ethnicity status, but trends over time were comparable., Conclusions and Implications: At present, there is no optimal method for adjusting for the undercount of Māori in routinely collected health databases. Reassuringly, trends in fatal and serious non-fatal injury are similar across the methods of adjusting for the undercount., (© 2011 The Authors. ANZJPH © 2011 Public Health Association of Australia.)

Objective: The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the trends published in the New Zealand (NZ) Government's 2006 Suicide Trends document for hospitalised self-harm are misleading., Methods: Analysis of incident self-harm events resulting in hospitalisation and reference to published material on injury outcome indicators for the NZ Injury Prevention Strategy (NZIPS)., Results: The significant increase in rates of self-harm hospitalisation presented in Suicide Trends from 1989 to a large extent reflect changes in recording practice rather than any change in self-harm in the community. Indicators with significantly fewer threats to validity suggest there has been little, if any, increase in the incidence of self-harm. The authors of Suicide Trends did not adequately specify how they defined a case and, moreover, their methods were not consistent with those used for the NZIPS indicators., Conclusions and Implications: The methodological challenges to producing valid indicators for the purposes of measuring trends in important non-fatal injury are substantial. Unless we accept that the usual methods of measuring trends in non-fatal injury are misleading and commit to taking up the challenge to produce and use better indicators, we will continue to run the risk of misleading ourselves and the public.

Surgical strategies recently introduced to improve ventricular function have been based on the concepts of reduction of ventricular diameter, synchronization of myocardial activity, passive support of diastolic ventricular shape, and active support of systolic ventricular constriction. They have depended on several established theoretical assumptions, not all of which are totally valid. Clinical results have proved markedly variable. This is especially true for procedures designed to reduce the radius of the left ventricle. Some have reported up to 80% mortality, whereas others achieve results comparable with those for heart transplantation. Because of this, the method runs the risk to be rejected, or else, its more widespread application will be postponed until essential details concerning the basic concepts have been elucidated. It is these details which we discuss in this review.