Injury prevention activities: What should we really be doing?

Abstract

There is little doubt that primary prevention is the most effective mode of reducing mortality and morbidity from injury, and yet most of us, who spend our working lives dealing with the consequences of trauma, expend little time or energy on injury prevention. McDonald et al. have attempted to quantify United States (US) trauma centres’ injury prevention activities in this issue of Injury. The American College of Surgeons has always included injury prevention activities as one of the cornerstones of a Level I or II trauma centre, but until this study, little was known about the actual structure or process of injury prevention activities from a US trauma centre perspective. McDonald et al.’s findings are not startling, but they do provide some insight into the problem. This was a comprehensive survey of US Level I and II trauma centres, and at first glance the response rate of 60% may indicate the degree of apathy in which trauma prevention activities are traditionally held by clinicians. However, the survey instrument was a full 25 pages long, which explains the lower than desirable response rate. Despite this, most respondents were trauma programme managers or trauma nurse coordinators, who already bear the brunt of the clinical and administrative trauma workload within hospitals. Not surprisingly, only 14% of their time is spent on injury prevention.