Project
South East Regional A&E Data Collection and Sharing
Description:
During 2006, Government Office South East (GOSE) introduced a data sharing initiative between Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments and Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRP) in the region.
The initiative is part of the Home Office and Department of Health joint work agenda around community safety, drugs and alcohol and Local Area Agreements. The project was developed from the evidence base of a successful model of community violence prevention developed by Professor John Shepherd from Cardiff University. The Cardiff approach showed that A&E based interventions can enhance police interventions and that A&E derived information about violence is key to public health efforts.
Consequently the South East project encourages a closer working relationship between the NHS and CDRPs. It involves public health professionals, community safety, emergency medicine and police in promoting data collection and sharing between both medical and police sources such as:
- Police incident records
- Police custody records
- Police crime records
- Statistics from the hospital A&E Unit
- Victim Support and supplementary data
The initiative is underpinned by a five step process identified by GOSE for the strategic use of sharing anonymous assault data to prevent violence in a geographical area. These steps are:
- Regular exchange of A&E data with CDRPCSP (fortnightly in electronic format);
- Regular analysis of the A&E data (strategic & operational) in conjunction with other violence data sources;
- Regular commissioning & consideration of analytical products by RAG and TCG;
- Strategic & operational decisions routinely based on this analysis;
- Routine evaluation of the impact of these decisions
By the end of December 2007, 30 of the existing 33 Accident and Emergency Departments in the South East had agreed to collect assault data and share it with their local CDRPs. While these are in various stages of development a number are already regularly sharing depersonalised data with CDRPs and community safety partnerships to some effect.
Project status: Ongoing
Project type: Research Projects
Project code: 1408
