Injury Prevention - A Surgeon's Challenge

Abstract

Copyright: © 2012 Haasper C, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Despite the fact that the WHO proclaimed injury prevention as a key issue of the Bone and Joint Decade 2000–2010 one has to realize that injury prevention has a far too little importance in minds. In fact, injuries result in more life years lost than neoplasms, cardiovascular diseases, cerebral strokes, or diabetes, and is hence considered a neglected epidemic. Education, engineering, and enforcement are the well known major pillars of prevention. As a specialist for the injured, it is the surgeons’ task to identify and develop preventive interventions, since she/he has the inevitable systematic understanding of the causes of injuries and their short and long term consequences for the patient. Although prevention promises a decrease of unintentional injuries this does not compromise the economic interests of hospitals and trauma surgeons.