Background

The South West Public Health Observatory and Network of Public Health Observatories have become part of Public Health England, an executive agency of the Department of Health.

Public Health England has been established to protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing and to reduce inequalities. It will lead on the development of a 21st- century health and wellbeing service, supporting local authorities and the NHS to deliver the greatest possible improvements in public health. It came into being in April 2013. For all corporate information please see www.gov.uk/phe

The Injury Profiles are now managed by Public Health England's Knowledge and Intelligence Team (South West) - formerly the public health intelligence team at the South West Public Health Observatory.

This is historic archive:

The South West Public Health Observatory is the lead PHO for injuries and is a partner in the Injury Observatory for Britain and Ireland. We have drawn on the expertise of our partners, including the network of PHOs and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA) in devising this set of indicators.

Injuries are preventable and injury prevention should be an important public health concern. However, efforts can be hampered both by the will to make injury prevention a priority at local level and lack of access to useful data.

We aim to support injury prevention through the Injury Profiles by highlighting some key aspects of the injury burden and the extent of variations across England. We also identify some data quality issues that need to be taken into account and addressed locally.

Given the diversity of issues involved in injury prevention, it would be an impossible task within resource constraints to address the detailed information needs of the various specialist injury prevention groups and leads involved. Instead, we have been pragmatic in drawing on existing 'top level' indicators but also extending this with an equal number of experimental indicators.

The Injury Profiles were first released March 2012. Given the current public health re-organisation we cannot guarantee that all the indicators will be updated in future. However, we intend to develop the tool further and we would appreciate your feedback through our survey.

If you would like to promote this tool - please see a copy of our Flyer.