Role Of Injury In Public Health

There are many aspects of public health that need to be focused on, injury being one of them. Injury comes in two forms, intentional and unintentional. With regard to intentional injury, self-harm and suicide have been classified as major public health issues. Everyone is affected by injury regardless of age, sex, race, or socioeconomic status. Injury is the leading cause of death for Americans ages one to 44, and it claims the lives of about 199,800 people every year. More Americans die from injuries and violence than from any other cause including cancer, HIV, and the flu (CDC, 2016). As times change the availability of harmful drugs increases, along with the mentality of “it will never happen to me” when it comes to addiction or injury,
Many injuries are accidental, just random occurrences that turn out to be harmful. Injury hasn’t always been an area of concern for public health officials. Looking back to the 1900s, the top 10 causes of death were extremely different from what they are today. Unintentional injuries are the fourth leading cause of death and intentional injuries are now the tenth (CDC, 2017). These injuries can be controlled and prevented in numerous ways, which would benefit our society’s public health status immensely.
Injury has made its way onto the list of top concerns as it began to creep in and become a problem for public health people. Injury doesn’t only leave a person in pain, it leaves them with potentially life long side effects such as mental health problems and financial instabilities. The total cost of injuries and violence in
There have been major improvements made with preventing three of the leading causes of death in the U.S. just by changing exercise routines, dietary routines, and not smoking. This success encouraged actions to be taken in order to control and prevent injury and suicide related morbidity and mortality. Public health personnel realized that the increase in acceptance of importance of healthy behaviors on a person’s health resulted in the positive changes that were being made (Dahlberg & Mercy, 2009). In 1989 the report of the secretary’s task force on youth suicide recommended a course of action for reducing the substantial increases in youth suicide that had occurred over the past decades (Dahlberg and Mercy, 2009). In December 2010 the Department of Health and Human Services introduced ‘Healthy People 2020’ as a method to track many important areas of public health in an effort to prevent and control various ongoing issues. One of the goals of this program is to attain high- quality, longer lives free of preventable disease, disability, injury, and premature deaths (CDC, 2015). The Healthy People 2020 organization is a division of the Healthy People 2010 organization that is concerned with some of the same objectives, one of them being injury and violence, specifically motor vehicle crashes and