25 Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN)
25.3 Description
- SAMHSA administered DAWN from 1992 through 2011 (legacy DAWN) and reestablished the current version of DAWN in 2018.
- De-identified, subject-level.
- Nationally represented public health surveillance system that continuously monitors drug-related visits to hospital emergency departments (EDs).
- A DAWN case is any ED visit involving recent drug use that is implicated in the ED visit.
- Captures ED visits that are directly caused by drugs and those for which drugs are a contributing factors.
- The dataset includes demographics, drugs involved in the ED visit (up to 16 drugs from 2004 through 2008 and up to 22 drugs from 2009 through 2011), toxicology confirmation, route of administration, type of case, and disposition of the patient following the visit.
- One data file per year
25.6 Collection Methodology
- Data is extracted from the medical records
- Stratified simple random sampling with oversampling in selected metropolitan areas is used to select the hospitals
- Target sample are all non-federal, short-stay, general medical and surgical hospitals in the United States that operate one or more EDs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Specialty hospitals, hospital units of institutions, long-term care
- All records of ED admissions of sampled hospitals are reviewed to find drug-related visits.
- Major changes to DAWN were instituted during 2003 as the result of a redesign intended to improve the quality and representativeness of DAWN estimates. As a result, comparisons cannot be made between the old DAWN (2002 and prior years) and the redesigned DAWN (2004 and forward). The year 2003 was a period of transition between the old DAWN and the redesigned DAWN. As a result, only interim, half-year estimates were produced for 2003.
- Data processing includes: consistency checks, standardization of missing values, recodes, calculation of derived variables, checks for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
25.7 Available at
https://www.datafiles.samhsa.gov/dataset/drug-abuse-warning-network-2011-dawn-2011-ds0001
25.8 User Guide/Data Dictionary
https://www.samhsa.gov/data/data-we-collect/legacy-dawn-drug-abuse-warning-network