Summary |
Morbidity and mortality due to injuries have always existed in the past but their recognition as a public health problem is a phenomenon of the mid-twentieth century. Policy makers and safety professionals in every country find it very difficult to institute changes which actually result in a dramatic decrease in fatalities due to injuries. This is mainly because experience shows that individuals do not follow all the instructions given to them to promote safety. Attempts to educate people regarding safety are also not very effective and wide variations are found between people’s knowledge and their actual behaviour. This is particularly true for those situations where we cannot select the people who will be involved in a particular activity. This makes it very difficult to promote safety by relying on improvements in individual behaviour and makes injury control a very complex process.
Injury control work needs very innovative working techniques and the same are being evolved slowly. The present institutional structures, collaboration mechanisms for intradisciplinary research, peer recognition methods, information dissemination and sharing techniques, and structures for interaction between scientists and the public are still somewhat weak. The better structures and methodologies will become apparent only if we consciously evaluate experiences, successes and failure in widely different societies and settings.
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