Hospitals are well placed to promote community safety and wellbeing through collecting information about patients who have been assaulted and sharing information appropriately. This can be done without compromising patient confidentiality.
A&E departments can collect and share information on the type, location and date/time of assaults. This information can be anonymised and shared with Community Safety Partnerships to inform violence reduction measures, including licensing restrictions and targeted policing.
The following dataset has been researched and validated and has been outlined on the College of Emergency Medicine website in the document: Information sharing to reduce community violence. This document provides a basic overview of the main elements of data sharing. Based on work in Cardiff, it is also known as ‘the Cardiff Model’.
Community Safety Partnerships could be sharing information at a local level and actively using this information to tackle violence in their area.
Currently only a small proportion of the cases of people who are injured and treated in hospital as a result of violent assaults are also recorded by the police.
The ultimate aim is to tackle violence generally, including gun and knife crime, but with a focus on areas where violence is most serious and prevalent.
Useful resources
These resources have been designed to support information sharing to tackle violence:
- an e-learning toolkit that provides a clear outline of what is involved in successful information sharing: ‘Reducing violence in our Ccmmunity: Emergency department datasharing’:
- good practice case studies which show how 5 local areas across England and Wales have successfully implemented data sharing work to reduce violence
- resource to support Community Safety Partnerships to engage well with A&E partners and use information that they may collect to reduce violence locally
- article providing eEvidence on the effectiveness of data sharing