Piloting a trauma surveillance tool for primary healthcare emergency centres

1Data for estimating the injury burden are usually drawn from vital registration or descriptive studies conducted at regional or central hospitals. 2-5 District or provincial-level data are useful for identifying broad health priorities and evaluating the impact of health interventions, but local-level data are equally important to identify locally relevant priority conditions, assist resource planning and inform targeted interventions. National or provincial statistics are also not always freely available, with delays in compilation, and are sometimes unreliable as a result of underreporting. 6 Evaluations of the effectiveness of injury prevention and trauma systems should be based on data that are representative of the population during all phases of care. 7 However, trauma surveillance at primary healthcare level in the Western Cape is currently non-existent. Elsies River is located in the Tygerberg Health subdistrict of the Cape Metropole and is historically a predominantly ‘coloured’ area. The after-hours trauma unit in the Elsies River Community Health Centre (CHC) was revamped in 2005 and serves over 43 000 people in Tygerberg, the majority of whom are uninsured. 8 Police statistics