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Abstract
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At a personal and public level, the world is experiencing true devastation. In homes, hospitals, streets and societies, loss is profound. Public health, and what it means in terms of individual and collective responsibility, is forefront in public and political discourse. Expertise (and science) is being recognised as friend not foe, and the technical tools used by public health scientists and practitioners are standard fare in the lay press.
So, what happens next? It is hard to know, and many of us are needing to focus so much on survival that we don't have the luxury to think about it. However, many of us are hoping that soon things will return to 'normal' and that we can again get about our business as usual.
The business world has been quick to point out that whatever we get back to, it will not be business as usual as we currently know it.1 People will adapt practices to mitigate day-to-day threats of endemic disease, and the structural changes brought about as an acute phase response will become system-level enablers with long-term benefit for national and global economies in ways totally unconnected to the threat of COVID-19.
I am wondering if health practitioners have been thinking so adaptively or have the long-term future of our healthcare system currently in mind. Our healthcare industry is well used to dealing with acute crises. In health, sudden surges in quantity or severity of cases, with consequent frenetic activity, are followed by time to tidy up, replenish stocks and get ready for the next surge. This is the life of Emergency Medicine all the world over and has been for many years. Indeed, it is the life of medicine more generally; that is, wait until a condition develops, diagnose it, treat it, close the book on that one and move on to treating the next. Public health is a little better in terms of systemic preparedness and prevention, but as shown by the COVID-19 crisis, it is revealing how much our conversation focuses on vaccine as the cure. The risk for health is that once the COVID-19 pandemic has moved on, we slip back to our business as usual, into health systems not be much changed by the experiences in which we have all invested so heavily.
What does this mean for Injury Prevention in the time of COVID-19 and beyond? If the manuscripts in this issue are an indication, injury prevention is already on the front foot. Success of any COVID-19 induced behaviour change depends on the strength of evidence on which these changes are based. Let's consider the two methods papers published in this issue of Injury Prevention by Dr David C Schwebel and colleagues to illustrate the point...
Language: en |