Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion

Injury causes substantial death, disability and costs to the health care system in the NT. It is:

  • the third leading cause of death overall in the NT and the second leading cause for Indigenous people,
  • the leading cause of death for people aged 1-44
  • the leading cause of Years of Potential Life Lost, and
  • the leading cause of Disability Adjusted Life Years lost for males and fourth leading cause for females.

Injury accounts for in excess of $20 million per year in acute care costs alone.

The breadth of issues that "injury" covers is vast: road safety, water safety, occupational health, crime prevention, domestic violence, suicide, and medical misadventure to name a few. More than almost any other public health issue, addressing injury prevention requires a high degree of coordination and collaboration between many different sectors.

It is not something, which any one agency can effectively deal with in isolation. An important shift has been to move away from accident prevention to a more proactive approach in safety promotion and to address people's perceptions of safety.

The Safety & Injury Unit plays a crucial role in multi-sector partnerships by providing public health, research and evaluation expertise as well as access to and analysis of injury data. In addition, the unit provides an important coordinating role.

Over the past years the activities program for the unit have focused on:

  • Membership of the National Injury Prevention Working Group
  • Membership of the Northern Territory Road Safety Task force
  • Membership of the NT Water Safety Advisory Council
  • Membership of the Firework Safety Strategy Project
  • Development of a Safe Community project in Palmerston

The current resourcing of the CDC Safety and Injury Unit consists of a specialist in public health medicine and a Project Officer both based in Darwin.

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