Targeted injury prevention needs information, and the basis is data. The EU Council Recommendation on injury prevention of 2007 recommends that Member States make better use of the existing data, and that they implement additional injury surveillance, when appropriate, in order to obtain comparable information. In almost all Member States, some data on injuries are available: on deaths, hospital discharges, external causes of injuries, traffic accidents and workplace accidents. It is examined how far these data meet the information needs of key stakeholders in injury prevention. General information about the health burden of injury, based on mortality and hospital discharges, is available and sufficient for identifying injury as a priority for health policy. Health indicators like lost life years, rates of hospitalisation, estimated rates of disabilities or health care costs could be derived, but are not widely available yet. Information about external circumstances (causes) of injuries is indispensible for targeted prevention, but only 12 countries have a harmonised surveillance system on external causes in place (European Injury Database IDB 2009). It is recommended that the harmonised collection of data on fatalities, hospital discharges and external causes of injuries should become compulsory within the new European health information system. The provision of harmonised injury indicators should be promoted. The surveillance system on external causes (IDB) should be implemented in countries without such system. National injury data administrators ('clearing houses') should be established for the provision of comprehensive injury reports and for serving the needs of key stakeholders in injury prevention.
BackgroundInjuries due to accidents or violence constitute a major public health
problem globally and also within the 27 member states of the European Union
(EU-MSs). In spite of the magnitude and the severity of the problem, injury
surveillance systems are not yet sufficiently well developed to accurately
quantify the burden of injuries on individuals, health services and society
in the EU-region. Much of the injury information generated up until now is
not comparable between countries, and not between registers, due to the lack
of harmonised methodology and classification.The hospital sector provides the best setting for collecting information as
this information relates to the most severe cases (while less severe cases
are treated by family doctors of school nurses for instance) and information
can be obtained easily on a large number of cases at low cost (while surveys
are expensive and suffering serious deficiencies as regards the specificity
of data obtained). The WHO-International Classification of Diseases and its
derivative classification on external causes of injuries provide the proper
tools for standardised data collection on injuries treated within the health
sector.Project ObjectivesJAMIE project aims at having by 2015 a common emergency departmental-based
surveillance system for injury prevention in operation in all MS. Such a
system should report on external causes of injuries due to accidents and
violence as part of the Community Statistics on Public Health. The project
will build on previous work on injury data exchange initiated by the
European Commission (EC) and a number of EU-member states, which resulted to
the so called Injury Data Base hosted by the EC.In order to make injury data collection affordable for countries to collect
and to have a greater number of countries joining the data exchange efforts,
JAMIE envisages to have a relatively limited set data elements being
collected in a representative sample of emergency departments in countries,
while collecting in a few departments deeper information on the
circumstances of the injury event.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.