• Advocacy

Of the 119 million annual visits to US emergency departments, 42 million are related to injury.1 The enormous clinical burden of caring for injuries has led to increased recognition of the importance of injury research among emergency care providers, and this represents an important opportunity for injury researchers and emergency medicine to develop partnerships that will advance the field. Our goal is to briefly describe the challenges and opportunities that exist at the intersection of these related and interdependent fields.

Whereas much of traditional medical research is defined by organ systems or disease processes consistent with the structure of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), injury research and emergency care research are much broader and, as a result, share similar challenges. One important challenge …