The case for collaboration

Despite being the leading cause of death for children and adolescents from the age of one, a major cause of morbidity, disability and health service utilisation, and the single greatest inequality in health, injury prevention in the UK is hampered by a lack of evidence for effective interventions, and a lack of resources and infrastructure committed to addressing this issue. The publication of Preventing Accidental Injury – priorities for action, the report of the Accidental Injury Task Force by the Department of Health, provided a basis for the implementation of successful injury prevention programmes.

Research into injury prevention has also been hampered by issues such as

the variety of government departments and agencies with partial and overlapping remits for prevention
the lack of importance given to the area by the major health research funding agencies
the fragmentation of expertise by geography and discipline.

Injury prevention is a multi-disciplinary issue.

Despite these obstacles there is considerable expertise in injury prevention research in the UK. At the 6^th World Conference on Injury Prevention and Control held in Montreal in May 2002, 4.5% of research papers (55/1218) were submitted by UK researchers. On a per capita basis injury prevention research is much stronger in the US, Canada and Australia. These countries have a much stronger expressed commitment to injury prevention and have set up national prevention and research organisations to deliver on injury prevention. The Canadian Injury Research Network provides an example of such a network.

Preventing Accidental Injury – priorities for action has a variety of sections detailing gaps in our knowledge and has a section on the research infrastructure to fill these gaps. Among the recommendations made is for government to build up multi-disciplinary units and sustainable collaborations and networks to carry out the necessary research. Such centres, collaborations and networks would be instrumental in:

the development of the R&D workforce capacity to ensure a sufficient supply of senior researchers able to grapple with complex methods, work across boundaries and ensure difficult R&D designs are carried out on the ground;
fostering better understanding among researchers in different disciplines of the variety of valid methodological approaches to answering research questions;
providing mechanisms for breaking down barriers to effective working by encouraging the building of multi-disciplinary teams who can share and develop research methods as well as share data and research findings.

Additionally, there is a general R&D role to provide:

training and guidance to the research community on how to disseminate its research so it can be translated into practice. This can be achieved through meetings, virtual networks, dedicated data bases of ongoing projects, and journals which recognise accidental injury as a total concept;
training to local professional people in research methods and in preparing research proposals. Setting up a research network to co-ordinate community and local activities in injury prevention would facilitate developing strategies for working together and mapping the injury problem across the community.

One of the ambitions of the group is to host a UK injury prevention conference in the years between the biannual World Conferences on Injury Prevention and Control. There have been three successful Injury Prevention conferences in Wales between 1999 and 2002, hosted by the Collaboration for Accident Prevention Injury Control (CAPIC), which could serve as a template for a UK-wide conference. Success in hosting a large UK conference would boost our credibility in bidding to host a World Conference in the UK.

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