Each year, the Indian Health Service's Primary Care Provider, a monthly newsletter for health professionals working with American Indians and Alaska Natives, devotes one issue to injury prevention. The July 2011 issue included three helpful articles: a primer on holding focus groups for injury prevention, a pilot study on medications and falls risk in older native peoples, and an analysis of how one funder learnt how best to enhance their injury prevention efforts in native communities. This article describes ways in which other funding agencies could apply these lessons to their own efforts with tribal groups. The authors reviewed four pilot motor vehicle injury prevention projects with a careful look at successes and challenges in administration, partnerships, data collection, evaluation, and tailoring effective strategies to the community. It isn't often that such rich analyses are produced to improve relations between funder and funded, and I encourage anyone interested in implementing programmes in native communities to read this article as well as others by the same authors.

▶  Multiple authors. IHS Primary Care Provider. 2011;36:141–69.

The basic tenets of injury prevention, often expressed as the three E's (engineering, enforcement and education) sometimes need to be supplemented with an A for advocacy. Physician counselling has been shown to be an effective strategy to educate patients on numerous prevention topics, from obesity management to smoking cessation to child safety …