Program

Meeting Program

Title: Estimating the burden of injuries in sub-Saharan Africa

Location: Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom

Date: 17th September 2010

This meeting was one of a sequence of meetings related with injury measurement that was held at Swansea from 17th to 20th September 2010. In particular, the GBD-Injury Expert group meeting on 18th September discusses closely related issues and methods but in a global perspective.  To find out more about the other meetings, please visit the main meeting page (click here).

The purpose of this one-day meeting was to:

• Discuss progress on developing regional and country estimates of the burden of injuries.

• Discuss the technical basis for a cross-country collaboration on injury metrics. Thus, we examined the similarities and differences in information architecture, and identified the needs for common methods.

• Discuss the value of such research collaboration to all participants with the aim of identifying how the partnership may be structured differently in the future.  

Registration (8:45am – 9:00am)

Welcome, Introduction, and Overview (9:00am – 9:30am)

SESSION 1: Architecture of data sources for measuring injuries in Africa (9:30am – 11:15am)

In this session, we will examine the data sources inventory available from each country and discuss the similarities and differences in information architecture. In particular, we will seek to identify common types of sources (e.g. surveys, mortuary registers) and the common technical issues (e.g. handling recall biases, estimating completeness), which provide an important basis for this technical collaboration.

• Overview (Kavi Bhalla, 10 min)

• Poster viewing: Six country posters displaying country data sources and summary results: Ghana (Adofo Koranteng), Sudan (Safa Abdalla), Ethiopia (Kunuz Abdella), Nigeria (Uwom Eze), Zambia (Robert Mtonga), Mozambique (Jerry Abraham)   (25 min)

• Panel presentation: Six country poster presentations (30 min)

• Panel discussion: Similarities and differences in data sources  (25 min)

BREAK (11:15am – 11:30am) 

SESSION 2: Analytical methods for common types of data sources  (11:30am – 12:30pm)

This session will explore methods for handling some common types of data source that are unique to Africa, and on methods for triangulating to national estimates from multiple country data sources. Note that this Session will not discuss some key data sources that are covered later. Notably, mortuary data is discussed in Session 3, and surveys and hospital datasets, will be discussed in the GBD-Injury meeting on the following day (18th September). 

• Overview of methods (Kavi Bhalla, 5 min)

• Estimating injury mortality from census data and HDSS data (Kavi Bhalla, 15 min)

• Estimating national burden of injuries: Sudan vs Mozambique (Safa Abdalla and Jerry Abraham, 15 min)

• Panel discussion (25 min)

LUNCH (12:30pm – 1:30pm)

SESSION 3: Special Focus: Mortuary data  (1:30pm – 3:45pm)

Mortuaries, and hence mortuary records, already exist in most major urban centers in Africa. Several of us have conducted research on injury mortality patterns using mortuary data collected retrospectively or prospectively. This session focuses first on technical issues related with using mortuary data to estimate population-based injury mortality rates in the current project. 

Next, we will focus on the long-term perspective. WHO recognizes the potential value of conducting injury surveillance at mortuaries and is developing guidelines that will help to systematize the process. This session will include a panel discussion that will allow researchers to provide feedback to WHO on the technical and logistical practicality of the guidelines.  

• Overview of estimating injury mortality from mortuary data (Kavi Bhalla, 20 min)  

• Testing completeness of mortuary data by linking with police records (Adofo Koranteng, William Ackaah, and James Damsere Derry, 20 min)

• Cross-national comparison of mortuary data (Uwom Eze, 20 min)

• Guidelines for prospective mortuary surveillance (Joan Ozanne-Smith and Kidist Bartolomeos, 20 min) followed by reactions from panel  (40 min)

• Panel Discussion  (15 min) 

BREAK (3:45PM - 4:00PM)

SESSION 4: Panel Discussion : Improving future collaboration  (4:00pm – 5:00pm)

Collaboration is successful when all participants make progress towards their research and policy agendas. The injury estimates produced in this project can be used to target a wide range of policy makers, including international funding agencies, national policy makers and advocacy agencies.  The purpose of this session is to assess the current project in relation with the primary research and advocacy goals of the collaborators. This panel discussion will seek to identify how things should be done differently in the future. 

We will discuss the potential outputs from this project and assess what purpose these serve and which should be given priority. The potential list of products from this project include:

• Regional Reports: Burden of injury reports for the four regions of Sub-Saharan Africa

• Country Reports: Selected country burden of injury reports

• Country data repositories: For example: Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia

• Developments in methods: e.g. using mortuary surveillance, census data, HDSS site data for injuries

Acknowledgements:  This project on estimating the burden of injuries in Africa is supported by a grant from the World Bank Global Road Safety Facility to Harvard University. The sequence of Africa-GBD-ICE Injury meetings at Swansea is partially supported by funding from the Violence and Injury Prevention program of the World Health Organization.

For further information: Please contact kavi_bhalla@harvard.edu