Injury prevention: achieving population-level change

Injury remains a leading cause of death and disability for all sectors of the community in all regions of the world.1–3 Since the 1960s when injury was conceptualised as a public health problem, there has been an escalation of knowledge relating to ‘what works’ to prevent injury. However, the rapid development of new injury prevention knowledge is quickly outstripping society’s capacity to implement it.4 This supplement of Injury Prevention brings together examples of empirical-based injury prevention research that demonstrate the state-of-the-art methods of achieving population-level reductions in injury-related harm. The issue also includes contributions that make the case for expanding existing public health paradigms of injury prevention beyond ‘what works’ and towards understanding the contexts and supports necessary for embedding effective injury prevention interventions within sustainable, synergistic systems of safety promotion. Population health science is one orienting frame for understanding and addressing the conditions that shape large-scale distributions of injury outcomes. Galea and Keyes5 describe how population health science can inform public health action in terms of ‘what works’ and ‘when’ and ‘for whom’. They pose a series of considerations injury researchers can use to both uncover the …