Community-based childhood injury prevention interventions: what works?

Unintentional injury, with its broad range of injury types, possible countermeasures, and great number of agencies involved in its prevention, lends itself to community-based approaches. In this paper we examine 10 community-based injury prevention programmes that have targeted childhood injury prevention and have been evaluated using some measure of outcome. We investigate the nature of the intervention, targeting, the length of programmes and multi-agency involvement. We also consider how the programmes have been evaluated, and what outcome, impact and process measures have been used. The information on the intervention and how it was evaluated, how effective the programme was, and the strength of the evidence, is summarized in tabular form. There is increasing evidence emerging about the effectiveness of community-based approaches in injury prevention. Important elements of such approaches are long-term strategy, effective focused leadership, multi-agency collaboration, tailoring to the needs of the local community, the use of local injury surveillance, and time to coordinate existing and develop new local networks. We recommend that there is a need to develop indicators to assess and monitor a culture of safety, programme sustainability and long-term community involvement.