Injury prevention & mitigation |
Challenges: | Opportunities: |
Often, data collected on the pre-injury phase only superficially characterizes the injury epidemiology in a region. | Data collection needs to ‘dig-deeper’ to better understand the injury epidemiology including major social, economic, behavioral, and environmental risk factors. Fields (eg, injury location or activity at the time of injury) and technologies (GPS, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software) that can address this gap should be considered. |
Current dissemination strategies often do not target local stakeholders. | Improved dissemination of findings to government and relevant community-based organizations as opposed to just academic audiences; improved visualization of findings to ease communication to stakeholders (eg, maps, graphs…etc.). |
Quality of trauma care |
Challenges: | Opportunities: |
Missing or incomplete data fields | The use of electronic data collection to improve patient tracking and reduce rates of missing or incomplete data. |
Variation in trauma registries across LMICs (eg, lack of consistency between patient inclusion criteria, variable definitions, severity scoring…etc.). | Standardization of trauma registries through the development of a standardized minimum dataset would allow for increased external benchmarking of outcomes, and consequently provide more data to inform QA efforts; could also serve as an important resource to guide development of new trauma registries. |