Joint action on monitoring injuries in Europe (JAMIE)

BACKGROUND: Injuries due to accidents or violence constitute a major public health problem globally and also within the 27 member states of the European Union (EU-MSs). In spite of the magnitude and the severity of the problem, injury surveillance systems are not yet sufficiently well developed to accurately quantify the burden of injuries on individuals, health services and society in the EU-region. Much of the injury information generated up until now is not comparable between countries, and not between registers, due to the lack of harmonised methodology and classification. The hospital sector provides the best setting for collecting information as this information relates to the most severe cases (while less severe cases are treated by family doctors of school nurses for instance) and information can be obtained easily on a large number of cases at low cost (while surveys are expensive and suffering serious deficiencies as regards the specificity of data obtained). The WHO-International Classification of Diseases and its derivative classification on external causes of injuries provide the proper tools for standardised data collection on injuries treated within the health sector. PROJECT OBJECTIVES: JAMIE project aims at having by 2015 a common emergency departmental-based surveillance system for injury prevention in operation in all MS. Such a system should report on external causes of injuries due to accidents and violence as part of the Community Statistics on Public Health. The project will build on previous work on injury data exchange initiated by the European Commission (EC) and a number of EU-member states, which resulted to the so called Injury Data Base hosted by the EC. In order to make injury data collection affordable for countries to collect and to have a greater number of countries joining the data exchange efforts, JAMIE envisages to have a relatively limited set data elements being collected in a representative sample of emergency departments in countries, while collecting in a few departments deeper information on the circumstances of the injury event.