Eds Frederick P Rivara, Peter Cummings, Thomas D Koepsell, David C Grossman, Ronald V Maier

Cambridge University Press, £65, pp 314 

ISBN 0 521 661528

Rating:

Evidence based programmes of injury prevention have contributed to a substantial decline in the number of unintentional deaths during the 20th century, but the tools used to assemble the evidence have been borrowed from other disciplines. This textbook aims to draw the strands together, to provide "a comprehensive source of knowledge on all research designs available for injury control and prevention" in one primer. The target readership is thus broad, and includes not only those who practise researchin emergency medicine, orthopaedics, public and occupational health medicinebut also those who commission, evaluate, and fund it.

The content reflects this broad church. For medical specialists who aspire to research but lack a basic grounding in epidemiology, there are clearly written introductory chapters on study design, sampling, randomisation, data collection, and analysis. For the epidemiologist, new to the field of trauma, who seeks an overview of international measures for counting and classifying cases by cause and severity, there are also excellent introductory chapters. And for the health and safety planner, or the reader who wishes to assess existing research and services, there are sections on systematic review and the evaluation of programmes of injury prevention.

Herein lies both a strength and weakness: each constituency will find something new and useful, but also passages within their own sphere of knowledge that may appear rather basic; and each would need to employ the extensive list of further reading before fully being able to apply, as well as to understand, injury research. The occupational health and safety fraternity will wonder also how it has come to be overlooked.

To this extent Injury Control fails to meet its stated aim of comprehensiveness. But the book still has much to commend itnotably a pervading enthusiasm that should inspire others to embark on new research in the field and a rich fund of examples to stimulate fresh ideas.

Can similar or better information be obtained elsewhere? To investigate, I submitted the query "injury and control" to the internet search engine AltaVista and followed relevant links over a pleasant half hour. I found, among 33 institutions specialising in injury prevention, some that offered free teaching material, subscription courses online, and even free live video seminars on injury epidemiology; also, several online textbooks of statistical methods and 105 books (of practical rather than research interest) on accident prevention listed by amazon.com

No source, however, had the breadth of coverage, utility, or convenience of this primer. Moreover, none offered such good examples to illustrate the research application. One wonders where else, for example, one could find suggestions on assessing person-time at risk in skiers by using their lift tickets; collecting data on the wearing of seat belts from a moving car; navigating the ethical minefield of "intimate partner violence"; or defining the road intersections at which pedestrians have been injured as "cases" in a case control study of road safety. Injury Control is at its strongest when it focuses on specific issues like these from which we can all learn, and it does this sufficiently often and well to fill an important gap in the market.

Keith T Palmer, Medical Research Council clinical scientist and honorary consultant occupational physician. 

Southampton ktp{at}mrc.soton.ac.uk