Letter

Accidents needn’t happen

Dear healthmatters — As a paediatric liaison health visitor with a specialist role in childrens’ accidents and prevention I was interested to read the article Accidents will happen - but why?

Major accident events make horrific headline news, but every day thousands of people receive medical treatment for injuries as a result of accidents at home, at work or on the roads.

The Health for All 2000 campaign particularly targets accident prevention and has helped to focus attention on this issue.

Recently there have been several organisations looking at ways of improving the situation. Recommendations of the joint report by NAHA and RoSPA Action on Accidents call for an integrated and comprehensive strategy. It gives specific examples of how the health services can help, and how different agencies can work together.

The Child Accident Prevention Trust has published a guide to accident prevention and recently ran workshops on approaches to local child accident prevention, to encourage the sharing of projects, problems, resources and ideas.

The co-ordination of the work of these agencies, and others, would seem to be essential if the limited resources available are to significantly reduce accident risk.

Those of us already working in accident prevention know that improving local data collection, including information on causes, is only one of the many tasks ahead of us and would endorse the call for a holistic approach Health visitors have always been concerned to help reduce accidents in the high risk groups — the very young and the elderly — and will undoubtedly rise to the challenges set by the campaign.