Craig wows the crowd

A particular highlight for many delegates to the 2nd National Conference was an address by Craig Patterson. Craig is currently the Director of Health Policy for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, as well as the Secretary of the AIDS Council of New South Wales (ACON), a member of the National Injury Prevention Advisory Council (NIPAC), and Chair of the New South Wales Ministerial Forum on Injury Prevention.

This was Craig's message to those present:

The resourcing of injury prevention initiatives in Australia is related to the level of public interest and political commitment to this area. The difficulty for injury prevention is that it is multidisciplinary and intersectoral in the nature of its development and implementation, and this hampers the ability to develop an effective political constituency to fight for adequate resourcing. Injury prevention advocates must turn to successful models that have been actioned in other areas of public health(chiefly, and most colourfully, exemplified by our response to HIV-AIDS in this country. Injury issues must be packaged in such a way that they touch and concern individual Australians sufficiently for an effective political constituency to be developed. The experience of the advocacy initiatives relating to HIV-AIDS over the last ten years are examples which injury prevention advocates should unpack and consider.

Although there is clearly a recognition that injury is an important issue and one which should be tackled, it remains very much the poor relation when compared to other health priority areas.

Many groups are working actively to promote injury prevention and control(clinicians, lawyers, social workers, community advocates, consumers, as well as bureaucrats and regulators at the Commonwealth, State and local government levels. However, until these groups are able to form themselves into an effective collaboration, supported by an active community constituency, there will be too many small voices crying in the wilderness.

Good research and good strategic ideas must be able to be translated into action, and that means attracting the necessary dollars. Injury, as an issue, needs to become politicised, to establish a constituency which represents all of the groups involved, including people who have been directly affected such as the families and friends of injured people. Such a strong constituency would have the power to lobby effectively for injury prevention to be given a higher profile.

The 2nd National Conference is an excellent example of the kind of forum which will aid this process.