Systemic approach for injury and violence prevention: what we can learn from the Harlem Childrens Zone and Promise Neighborhoods

Introduction

An escalating volume of injury prevention research over the past half century has dramatically increased our understanding of the risk and protective factors associated with injury and violence, and the efficacy of interventions for addressing these risk factors across the social ecology.1 2 However, this increased understanding has not resulted in widespread adoption and implementation of evidence-based and evidence-informed interventions, and countries such as the USA are still experiencing increased rates of injury and violence morbidity and mortality.3 The disassociation between our knowledge of injury causation and effectiveness of our efforts to reduce injury has been discussed in the injury prevention literature as the ‘research to practice gap’ and has focused primarily on the disconnect between evidence-based programmes and their wide-scale adoption.4

This research to practice gap evident in injury prevention is simply a special case of the more generic challenge evident…

Read the full article ›