Green Cross: Application for analyzing School injuries

Abstract

Unintentional injuries are a major cause of untimely deaths among children and adolescents. Violence and injuries in the schools have raised the need to collect the injury data routinely and to find ways to analyze the potential risks of the near-miss cases. The aim of this study is to explore the injury data collection method piloted with the Green Cross software and to describe the characteristics of the school injuries (n=88). The qualitative data consisted of user-interviews and data reports.As the main result of this study, the Green Cross software provides a decent way to monitor the injuries in the school context in such a way that the accidents, incidents, injuries and near-miss cases become more visible. A novel finding was that many school injuries were unpredictable, connected to human factor issues, persons acting against norms and regulations or using structures or products in a way they are not supposed to be used.