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How to measure the success or failure of a conference is always problematic. One crude but perhaps encouraging aspect of the Action on Injury Conference held in London in November 1998 was that a large proportion of the people who attended were not the regulars you see at most injury prevention gatherings in the UK! If this could be used as a measure of progress, we have taken at least one step in the right direction.
A brief history
What is the Action on Injury initiative? What were we trying to achieve? When Professor Stephen Jarvis, Professor of Community Child Health at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, invited a group of people together to consider how to put injury prevention for children and young people more securely on the strategic map in March 1997, we quickly generated several ideas of how to move matters forward but we rapidly realised that we could not pursue all simultaneously.
The make-up of the group is in itself interesting. Stephen Jarvis managed to bring together senior representatives of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine, the Royal Colleges of Paediatrics and Child Health and of General Practitioners, key academic departments with a longstanding interest in childhood injury prevention research, the BMJ Publishing Group, and the Child Accident Prevention Trust. What was novel about this group was that the Royal Colleges and the Faculty have not been regarded as leaders in this subject, but are influential players within UK medical circles. Later, we were joined by officials from the health departments for the four countries of the UK.
Another key moment arrived in May 1997 and it was not of our doing—there was a general election that swept a new government into power. As a result, draft strategies started appearing on the table and civil servants were hunting …