Public Health and Policy projects
Our projects in this stream have focused on improving injury data available to clinicians and policymakers, and identifying the incidence of sports related injuries (particularly concussion) and how they can be prevented.
Improving and Analysing Routinely Collected Injury Data
The C4TS public health team were involved in the development of the new National Emergency Care Dataset for the UK, working alongside Public Health England, the Royal College for Emergency Medicine and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) plus other stakeholders. The new dataset (CDS- type 011) will come into effect from March 2019.
The former A&E information base used by clinicians and funders (commissioning groups) in England and Wales was the Accident and Emergency Commissioning Dataset (CDS 010). This was developed in the early 1980s, at a time the work of the ED was largely minor injuries and occasional major trauma. Since then there has been a sustained and rapid increase in the volume, scope and complexity of emergency care, which rendered the CDS 010 out of date.
To help fill this information vacuum, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine sponsored a project to replace CDS 010 with an improved A&E dataset. The Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) will provide better quality data on emergency care. It incorporates both the RCEM’s Unified Diagnostic Dataset, to improve the quality of recorded diagnosis, and the European standard Joint Action on Monitoring Injuries in Europe (JAMIE) minimum dataset for injuries.
Sport Injury
Injury is a frequent unintended consequence of playing sport. Concussion is now the most commonly recorded injury in professional rugby union in England and is increasing in incidence. During her work with C4TS, former Public Health and Policy lead Professor Allyson Pollock wrote influential books and articles about injuries in sport, particularly in rugby. Professor Pollock's book “Tackling rugby. What every parent should know about injuries” was published by Verso in 2014. Her team also published two systematic reviews, one on general injury in youth rugby and one on concussion in youth rugby along with a paper in the British Medical Journal on injury prevention in rugby.
More information about our sport injury projects
