26/07/2001

The injury surveillance system at the Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) maintains, analyses, reports on, disseminates and applies injury data to injury prevention. VISAR commenced in Victoria in 1988 with a paediatric collection based at the Royal Children’s Hospital and became an all age collection upon moving to MUARC in 1990. The data integrates into the feed-back cycle of data, research, implementation and evaluation and, accordingly, is closely linked to many other aspects of injury prevention. As a fundamental resource for injury prevention, it provides tools for both characterising and monitoring injury. The functions of injury data include: descriptive epidemiology of injury: - frequency - population rates - age and gender distribution - geographic distribution - cause (mechanism) of injury - activity when injured (eg. work, sport, transport) - nature of injury and body part injured - cross tabulations of these variables the basis for injury severity measures (quantification of injury severity), particularly in prediction of outcome measures such as death and functional capacity the basis for cost of injury studies identification of emerging or previously unrecognised hazards monitoring of trends and evaluation of interventions linkage between data sets to enhance the detail and quality of data case identification for research the basis for translation to prevention