Injury surveillance in Europe and the UK

Injuries are an important international public health problem, contributing an estimated 11.2% of the world total of disability adjusted life years in 2010.1 In the United Kingdom, falls are the second largest cause of years lived with disability.2 In addition, although deaths from road traffic collisions have fallen substantially in the UK over the past 20 years, deaths from injuries in the home have risen sharply, and without high quality data we have little understanding of the causes.3

In May 2007 the Council of the European Union recommended that EU member states develop national injury surveillance and reporting systems to monitor injury trends and evaluate the effectiveness of injury prevention initiatives.4 Consequently, the three year Joint Action on Monitoring Injuries in Europe project (JAMIE), funded by the European Commission (EC), was launched in 2011 with the aim of “having by 2015 a common hospital-based surveillance system for injury prevention in operation” across all EU member states.5 The number of countries contributing data to the European Injury Data Base (IDB-JAMIE) increased from 12 in 2011 to 20 in 2013.6 However, coordinated collection of injury data in Europe is now …