Injury and Violence Prevention

Injury and violence prevention is the branch of public health concerned with reducing how often, and how severely, people are physically hurt, whether from road crashes, falls, drowning, burns, poisoning or interpersonal and self-directed violence, and it treats most of what a layperson calls an accident as a preventable event rather than a random one. The field traces its modern shape to the automobile safety movement of the early 1960s, when activist Ralph Nader argued that cars themselves, not only careless drivers, could be engineered to be less dangerous, and to physician William Haddon's development of a matrix that maps prevention strategies across the person, the vehicle or agent, and the environment, and across the moments before, during and after an injury event.