Creating an entire community covering population based injury registration system: a developed country perspective

The public-health approach to injury prevention and control includes epidemiological assessment, development of prevention strategies, and evaluation of these strategies. Injury-surveillance systems should be capable of providing essential information for each of these elements. The scale of injury problem is not a matter of dispute. The costs of injury mortality and morbidity are immense not only in terms of lost economic opportunity and demands on national health budget but also in terms of personal and social sufferings. Despite this, few countries have comprehensive surveillance system that generates reliable information on the nature and extent of injuries, especially with regards to non-fatal injuries. Without reliable information health care planners are severely handicapped. They are unable to allocate resources efficiently in order to achieve the greatest impact in preventing injuries. This is true for planners at all levels, whether they are concerned with the world wide injury problem or national, regional or local level injury problems. Injury registries are indispensable in determining the incidence and trends in a particular population. A registry complements the cross-sectional studies of the differences in disease rates by longitudinal investigation. The initiation of the simultaneous monitoring of the incidence, mortality, morbidity, risk factor levels, social and behavioral tendency within defined community over a period of years will help in clarify the interrelation between these variables in terms of the dynamics of change in the natural history of injury trend. Information of injury occurrences and risk factors in population is very essential and surveillance provides this essential information that can be used for designing effective prevention strategies, appropriate allocation of health resource, assessment of effectiveness of the health programs, etc. The purpose of this registration is to follow the injury incidence and mortality trend in Japan using a whole community population covering registry that serve to most up to date information.