Article Text
Abstract
Background To investigate whether sharing and linking routinely collected violence data across health and criminal justice systems can provide a more comprehensive understanding of violence, establish patterns of under-reporting and better inform the development, implementation and evaluation of violence prevention initiatives.
Methods Police violence with injury (VWI) crimed data and emergency department (ED) assault attendee data for South Wales were collected between 1 April 2014 and 31 March 2016 to examine the rates and patterns of VWI. Person identifiable data (PID) were cross-referenced to establish if certain victims or events were less likely to be reported to criminal justice services.
Results A total of 18 316 police crimed VWI victims and 10 260 individual ED attendances with an assault-related injury were considered. The majority of ED assault attendances (59.0%) were unknown to police. The key demographic identified as under-reporting to police were young males aged 18–34 years, while a significant amount of non-reported assaults involved a stranger. The combined monthly age-standardised rates were recalculated and on average were 74.7 (95% CI 72.1 to 77.2) and 66.1 (95% CI 64.0 to 68.2) per 100 000 population for males and females, respectively. Consideration of the additional ED cases resulted in a 35.3% and 18.1% increase on the original police totals for male and female VWI victims.
Conclusions This study identified that violence is currently undermeasured, demonstrated the importance of continued sharing of routinely collected ED data and highlighted the benefits of using PID from a number of services in a linked way to provide a more comprehensive picture of violence.
- violence
- injury
- prevention
- record linkage
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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Footnotes
Contributors BJG designed the study, performed data analysis and prepared the first draft of the manuscript. ERB and ARD designed the study and prepared the first draft of the manuscript. SJL, JR and MAB were involved in the concept of the study and provided comments to the first draft. All authors contributed to and approved the final draft for submission.
Funding This study was funded by the Home Office Grant Reference Numbers 2013-094 and 2015–097.
Competing interests None declared.
Ethics approval The data presented in this manuscript are part of a routine surveillance dataset; the relevant permissions to use this data were sought through data disclosure agreements. As an additional security measure, files that contain PID were password protected, and accessed only by named project researchers.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.