I ask this, not as a rhetorical question, but a sincere one.1 There is a distinguished history of the self-conscious search for an identity statement for ‘injury’. A codified set of descriptors from WHO’s International Statistical Classification of Disease and Related Health Problems (ICD) is generally used as injury’s manifestational definition.2 3 Several common, but not universal, definitions are available to categorise the necessary additional dimension of severity.4 5 Haddon’s seminal work explaining the role of energy as agent in an epidemiological model of injury causation is now concreted into injury’s conceptual, aetiological definition.6 7 Has there been a similar search for the identity of ‘injury prevention’?

Using language that is essentially manifestational, injury prevention is frequently described as the process of intervening in the causation of injury in a …