Leadership, infrastructure and capacity to support child injury prevention: can these concepts help explain differences in injury mortality rankings between 18 countries in Europe?

BACKGROUND Mortality and morbidity rates, traditionally used indicators for child injury, are limited in their ability to explain differences in child injury between countries, are inadequate in capturing actions to address the problem of child injury and do not adequately identify progress made within countries. There is a need for a broader set of indicators to help better understand the success of countries with low rates of child injury, provide guidance and benchmarks for policy makers looking to make investments to reduce their rates of fatal and non-fatal child injury and allow monitoring of progress towards achieving these goals. This article describes an assessment of national leadership, infrastructure and capacity in the context of child injury prevention in 18 countries in Europe and explores the potential of these to be used as additional indicators to support child injury prevention practice. METHODS Partners in 18 countries coordinated data collection on 21 items relating to leadership, infrastructure and capacity. Responses were coded into an overall score and scores for each of the three areas and were compared with child injury mortality rankings using Spearman's rank correlation. RESULTS Overall score and scores for leadership and capacity were significantly negatively correlated to child injury mortality ranking. CONCLUSIONS Findings of this preliminary work suggest that these three policy areas may provide important guidance for the types of commitments that are needed in the policy arena to support advances in child safety and their assessment a way to measure progress.