New Injuries section on ScotPHO website!

The Scottish Public Health Observatory is a collaboration led by ISD Scotland and NHS Health Scotland, and includes the General Register Office for Scotland, Health Protection Scotland and the Glasgow Centre for Population Health. The aim of the collaboration is to provide an excellent understanding of the health of Scotland’s population and its ‘determinants’ to those working to improve population health in Scotland. The ScotPHO website (http://www.scotpho.org.uk/home/Healthwell-beinganddisease/injuries/inj_keypoints.asp) launched in December 2005 contains comprehensive information on a wide range of topics including behaviour, health, well being and disease and clinical risk factors.

In March of this year an ‘injuries’ section (http://www.scotpho.org.uk/home/Healthwell-beinganddisease/injuries/inj_keypoints.asp) was added to the ScotPHO website. This new section pulls together available information on injuries in Scotland. In this section, summary data and statistics on injuries in Scotland are presented, including:

• Population based information on injury trends and variation among adults
• Emergency hospital admissions data on unintentional injuries for both adults and children
• Trends in injury related mortality among adults and children
• Information on assaults and homicides, road traffic accidents and workplace injuries among adults
• Links to UK and international comparisons

Along with summary data and statistics, the website also provides background information, interpretation, policy notes, commentaries on data sources, references and links to further information and key sites including the Injury Observatory for Britain and Ireland and the ISD Unintentional Injuries Team. The pages will be updated annually, with the next update due in March 2010.