Media reports about accidents are frequently littered with a litany of descriptions of the injuries that victims have sustained.

One victim’s injuries may be “serious” while another’s are described as “grievous”.

A victim of a car crash is described as being in “critical” condition while a fellow passenger was lucky to escape with “slight” injuries.

An altercation between two people may result in “minor” injuries while somebody tripping over faulty paving may suffer “mild” bruising.

Baffled readers have reached out to Times of Malta asking us to decipher each of these terms.

How are injuries recorded?

Speaking to Times of Malta, a police spokesperson explained that when an accident takes place, a victim’s injuries are first certified by a hospital-appointed doctor, with the doctor’s report then passed on to the police.

After examining the victim’s injuries, the doctor will certify them as either “slight” or “grievous”.

Emergency doctor Jonathan Joslin explained to Times of Malta that this is a legal classification that emerges from Malta’s criminal code, which says that “bodily harm may be either grievous or slight”.

Grievous vs slight

Injuries in certain parts of the body are more likely to be considered grievous according to the law. Any injury that causes a “deformity or disfigurement” in a person’s face, neck or hands is automatically considered grievous, regardless of the severity of the injury.

Likewise, any wound that penetrates one of the body’s cavities (namely, a person’s stomach, chest or head) is also considered grievous while similar wounds in other parts of the body would be classified as slight.

Grievous injuries also include injuries that can cause permanent harm to a person’s health or organ function, as well as those that place a person’s life in danger.

Some injuries, such as fractures, are considered temporarily grievous, which doctors describe as grievous per durata. These injuries do cause deformity or disfigurement but are expected to heal perfectly after some time and are generally later reclassified as slight after some weeks when the injury has partly healed.

In practice, this means that the term “grievous” is used for a whole range of injuries, from those that are potentially life-threatening to a nasty but, ultimately, harmless gash on a person’s face. Even a seemingly trivial injury like a broken tooth is sometimes classified as grievous since it can be considered as leading to disfigurement in a person’s face.

Slight injuries, on the other hand, are those that are expected to not leave any permanent harm and do not cause disfigurement in a person’s face, neck or hands.

While the law does specifically describe what constitutes a slight injury, it simply defines it as an injury that does not have the same characteristics as a grievous injury.

Sometimes, the differences between the two can be quite complex, Joslin says, citing the example of a stab wound to the leg. If the stab wound has penetrated into a person’s arteries it will be classified as grievous but it could otherwise simply be considered slight.

So what are ‘serious’ injuries?

The law does not actually speak about serious injuries at all and the term doesn’t form part of the classification system.

Nevertheless, the term is used by the police in an effort to help the public understand the severity of injuries sustained during an incident.

A police spokesperson explained to Times of Malta that when receiving a report from doctors describing grievous injuries that are potentially life-threatening, the police choose to describe them as “serious” when issuing reports to the press. This is done in order to distinguish them from grievous injuries in which the victim’s life is not at risk.

In practice, the term “serious” exists in a sort of limbo. It is not legally defined and any injury that can be considered serious is formally classified as grievous but it is nevertheless used in press reports as shorthand for a life-threatening injury.

What about ‘mild’, ‘minor’ and ‘critical’?

Ultimately, the scale of injuries that are reported in the press is based on three terms: “slight”, “grievous” and “serious”.

Any other descriptions, such as “mild”, “minor”, “critical” or “at risk of dying” are simply descriptive flourishes used in place of these three terms.

So, a person who has sustained serious injuries is sometimes described as critical while someone whose injuries are classified as slight is said to have suffered minor injuries.

Do doctors also use this classification in their own work?

No, this simplified legal classification is used for practical purposes but doctors use more complex scales when they are judging the severity of an injury and the treatment required.

Joslin explained to Times of Malta that tools such as the Injury Severity Score and the Abbreviated Injury Scale both break down injuries into several complex stages, across different parts of a person’s body.