A Quantitative Analysis of the Activities of Designated Safe Communities: the Baseline Assessment in 2005

Abstract

Purpose: To investigate the activities and performance of designated and active safe communities till 2005. Methods: In this study, the entire 65 designated safe communities being active till 2005, were investigated based on the available virtual data. Data were extracted from the webpages of designated safe communities (saved in 2005) presented at the time in the WHO collaborating center for community safety promotion website. Frequency tables, graphs, Pearson correlation coefficient and chi-square tests were used to analyze the data. Results: The majority of safe communities belonged to Sweden, Norway and Australia respectively. 26.2% of safe communities had started their activities before 1990. Nearly all of the communities had specific injury prevention programs for different age groups and 49 (75.4%) of safe communities had programs for high risk groups. Activities in the field of occupational safety promotion were more frequent in Sweden compared to other countries (P<0.01). 92.3% of safe communities had declared having some kind of injury surveillance. A total of 17 theses, 23 books and 71 journal papers (either local or international) and 542 other types of publications were the result of safety promotion activities reported by different safe communities. All the published journal articles belonged to only 10 safe communities. Conclusion: Safe communities throughout the world have shown to be successful but need more focus on sustainability and improvement of relevant activities. Moreover, vast inconsistency in reporting the activities, approaches and methods seemed to be a barrier against having a reliable efficacy evaluation of the safe communities.