CIHR Team in Child and Youth Injury Prevention

The CIHR Team in Child and Youth Injury Prevention addresses calls for improved Canadian child and youth injury prevention initiatives by focusing on research and its application for prevention, training and capacity building, and enhanced communications within the injury prevention community. Activities include assessing: the burden of child and youth injury by looking at the long-term costs to the individual, family and society; paediatric trauma systems - getting the right patient to the right place at the right time; Aboriginal child and youth injury; and high risk injury groups based on stages of childhood (supervision of young children, child pedestrian injury, snowboarding injury, junior high curriculum-based sports-injury prevention, and identifying adolescent risk takers). The Team will use novel methods (e.g. spatial analysis) to identify risk factors based on injury hotspots; virtual reality environments to study child behaviour; and web-based interventions to deliver information to youth. Innovative products will include a Web Portal, a Child and Youth Injury Indicators Dashboard, and an Atlas of Child and Youth Injury. The Dashboard will provide current information on injury indicators to inform the development of injury prevention policies, prevention and research. The Atlas will include maps and spatial analyses from the Burden, Trauma and Aboriginal Injury studies. The Web Portal will serve as a communications platform for on-line discussions, seminars, meetings, and communiqués; house the Dashboard and Atlas, providing current surveillance information; serve as a repository for injury prevention knowledge, evidence and tools; display team abstracts, presentations, publications and reviews; and link and present information from other sources. This research systematically builds on past advancements and will be undertaken in co-operation with many child and youth injury prevention partners, including Safe Kids Canada and the Assembly of First Nations.