Enhancing Violence Prevention through Accident and Emergency Department Data Sharing in the North West
In July 2009 the Department for Health put together a national bidding programme to provide funding for partners in the government’s Tackling Knives Action Programme (TKAP) areas to enhance or improve the sharing of data between emergency departments (EDs) and local partners. On behalf of Government Office North West and local partners, the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University successfully bid and secured funds to enhance ED datasets and develop faster, routine data sharing between EDs and Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs). The project runs from August 2009 to March 2010 and is being led by the Trauma and Injury Intelligence Group (TIIG).
Across the North West there are 31 EDs, 31 of which have signed up to share their routine data with TIIG on a regular basis. Five of these EDs are in the TKAP areas of Manchester, Liverpool and Preston.
The first stage of the project was to engage with North West TKAP area EDs to assess their potential to collect the nationally recommended violence dataset from assault patients (e.g location, time and date of incident and assault type [e.g. weapon of use]) (see:
College of Emergency Medicine). Through TIIGs already established links with EDs and local partners, 20 out of 32 AEDs in the North West are now collecting, or setting up systems to collect, additional data from assault patients.
The Xchange model - Merseyside
Currently five out of six EDs in Merseyside have agreed to be part of the project. Since November 2009 three EDs have been sharing additional assault data on a bi-weekly basis, with TIIG. TIIG cleans the data and produces a short report for the each individual police Basic Command Unit to be used in their bi-weekly Tasking and Coordination meetings. The information is used alongside other partners’ data to target local action to prevent violence. Feedback on how the data has assisted partners in developing and implementing interventions to prevent violence are provided to TIIG, who disseminate this to EDs. Data quality issues and areas for improvement are also provided by TIIG to the EDs.
Recently the Royal Liverpool University Hospital ED data was used by Merseyside Police to guide Operation Xchange (supporting the Liverpool After Dark initiative). The operation resulted in weapons (e.g. knives) being recovered and a 21% reduction in wounding offences between December 14th and 23th 2009 compared to the same period in 2008. There was also a 57% reduction in assaults attendances to the Royal Liverpool ED during the operation period compared to the same period in 2008.
In the long term multi-agency use of ED data provided via TIIG has been shown to contribute to a reduction in violence and assault attendees amongst EDs in Merseyside. For example, over a 5 year period, Arrowe park ED attendances for assault and alcohol-related assaults have reduced by 33% and 41% respectively.
Last updated 12/02/2010