Working Party on the Costs of Injury

Rationale

Injuries represent an important source of preventable mortality and morbidity in all parts of the world. Implementation of risk-reduction measures, however, is costly and resources available for injury prevention are scarce. Therefore, injury prevention is subject to priority setting which is a complex issue dealing with ethics, politics, and economics. Economic analyses provide important assistance for priority setting processes.

This Working Party was launched in 1995 following recommendations issued at the ECOSA 1994 conference, ‘Priority setting in accident prevention’.

Scope

The scope of this working group is the societal costs of injuries and home and leisure injury control in particular.

Partners

• Athens University Medical School, Greece
• Consumer Safety Institute, the Netherlands
• Erasmus Medical Centre, the Netherlands
• Hillerød Sygehus - Frederiksborg Amts Sundhedsvæsen, Denmark
• Austrian Road Safety Board / Dept. of Home, Leisure & Sports
• Ministerio della Sanità, Italy
• Norwegian Ministry of Public Health, Norway
• Public Health Agency of Barcelona (ASPB)
• Univeristy of Wales, UK

• To develop a tool to assess the societal costs of injuries in Europe as an aid to priority setting and risk management decision-making in injury control.
• To develop a model for the calculation of direct medical costs and a model for the calculation of other societal costs.
• To develop a framework for reporting the results of injury cost calculation to European as well as national policy makers and health care administration.

• The Working Party has published reports on the state-of-the-art concerning measuring the costs of injury in Europe (1998), and an annotated bibliography (1998).
• A glossary of terms for costs of injury studies (please click on 'Injury glossary' above) is published on the EuroSafe website and maintained by the Working Party.
• The Working Party also submitted a project proposal that was financed by the Injury Prevention Programme of the European Commission: the Eurocost project. Phase two of the Eurocost project was finished mid-2004. The objective of the project was to collect, analyse and harmonise data on injury incidence and related health care consumption and costs, resulting in a country specific methodology based on mutual agreements, and to estimate the medical costs of injury in each participating country, to assess and explain international differences, and to extrapolate the results for the European Community as a whole.