The Annual Awards Banquet will be Friday night and all are welcome. The other 2010 Healthy People Objective public meetings will be held in the fall in Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, Seattle and Sacramento. This process should include input from the multiple stakeholders involved in injury prevention and control. The goal of this process should be to generate a blueprint for injury surveillance that will promote efficient and coordinated use of injury surveillance resources at the federal, state and local levels, articulate the special needs of injury surveillance systems and enhance the visibility of injury surveillance data. These issues make it difficult to link, compare, or aggregate data from different states and within states from different data systems.
Consensus exists on surveillance case definitions for only a few types of injury.
Pooling of some surveillance resources may be appropriate, because data collection systems covering multiple types of injuries and multiple public health areas already exist for some types of injuries and injury risk factors. A road map is needed to help states and federal agencies allocate surveillance resources and develop comprehensive injury surveillance systems that meet needs at the community level. Public health action should be based at least in part on surveillance data. For that reason it is critical that this road map be developed collaboratively with input from both epidemiologists and staff involved in creating and running injury prevention and control programs. Injury prevention is still struggling for recognition as a critical piece of the public health canon.