Following the authorities of injury prevention on Twitter

On 19th September 2018, Adnan Hyder @Ahyder1, was speaking on injury prevention in the 21st century. I was not surprised because Professor Hyder is one of the world’s foremost injury prevention researchers and has worked in 85 countries of the world for over the past 2 decades. I often take time to go through his tweets and learn something every time I do it. It is fascinating how active he is on twitter, when I follow a specific twitter thread and realise how much educating it can be.

The amount to learning multiplied when there is an interaction between two more of such personalities i.e. Prof Rebecca Ivers @rebeccaivers. Today I went out for the lunch alone with my mobile. From the first tweet on my twitter display, I learnt that both the professors are having an interaction on "injury prevention and public health research in the 21st century." I was more interested to browse the tweets also because the whole thing was organised by the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM) at Monash University Australia.

Being in different continent in real-time, I could not see or hear what Prof Hyder delivered during the Oration, but it was clear from the tweets what he was elucidating. The title itself implies a range of issues to be brought-in, discussed, highlighted and to be concluded with embracing partnership and collaborations for really achieving Injury Prevention in this 21st Century.

It was apparent from Prof Ivers' tweets that Prof Hyder was revealing the challenges of current times' injury prevention. It needs multi-party, multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary approach & actions in the current world of austerity and financial crises. As noted by Prof Ivers in her tweets, the key challenges were:

1. Huge numbers- 13,500 deaths every day globally due to #injury #violence. Yet there is no major attention to this external and premature cause of death that costs huge to families, society and nations.

2. #Prevention is not cheap, and data and evidence is not a luxury. Unlike for other illnesses where the treatment depends upon a vaccine or medication produced by pharmaceuticals, Injury prevention may also have a lot responsibility to individuals, family and society. In most low-income societies, there is lack of awareness and capacity to deal with injuries due to simultaneous burden of communicable diseases.

3. Acknowledgement of the issue not enough by policy makers - we need funded action and investment in #InjuryPrevention - not just lip service. Experts through the World Health Organisation have been calling its member states to come up with actions against it for decades. We need to re-think how to stimulate the decision-makers so that they start going into action.

4. How to achieve impact and go to scale - barriers between development and scale up. How do we integrate at scale to start with? In the past 25 years, world's injury prevention practitioners and experts congregate every second year to exchange knowledge and experience. A lot of developments are showcased with some successful scale-up also. Can we utilise this platform of World Safety Conference to debate, discuss and come up with solutions to this very needed aspect of the science of injury prevention? Renowned institutions in USA, Australia, Europe, Africa and Asia could collectively lead a programme to train injury prevention professionals to embed the scale-up right component at the beginning of project development.

5. What major discoveries for #InjuryPrevention in last decades? And have we really scaled up and made accessible known effective interventions like speed, safety belts, helmets etc? Big issues with inequity. I believe this is something to be embedded within the new public health and medicines training so that everyone is informed of the achievements in the past and guides the way forward. Simultaneously education practitioners (above #4) and decision-maker (above #3) may help to think about reducing inequalities through evidence thus generated.

6. Multiple people in need who don’t receive safety interventions, need to look at those in most need. This is the consequence of not having a system approach; all points 1-5 above contributed to this situation. This can be addressed ultimately.

7. Interventions alone not enough - need systems approaches, implementation guidelines, must be resourced and used. It is obvious from our past experience, evidence and experts' observations. This is also reflected on the theme of the address. Recently, the concept of system approach has become prominent to embrace the needs of the time. I hope international injury prevention communities will come up with solutions. 

Conclusion:

Upon looking into these specific tweets today, I have learnt a lot on the development and challenges of #InjuryPrevention in our times. I also learnt that how social media can spread knowledge across the world in real time. With this development of IT and social media sometimes we can virtually participate such important programmes anywhere.