Fall 2024: Public Health Injury Prevention and Control
Public Health PH285a
2 units | Course #30506
Friday, 12pm - 2pm | Berkeley Way West 1206
Course Overview
Injury is the leading cause of death for ages 1-44 and the leading cause of years of potential life lost up to age 65, surpassing heart disease and cancer. Efforts to combat injury are limited in comparison to chronic disease prevention. Injury is defined as unintentional or intentional damage to the body resulting from acute or chronic exposure to thermal, mechanical, electrical, or chemical energy, or from the absence of such essentials as heat or oxygen. Injuries occur as a result of occupational exposure, road traffic, firearms, violence, war, and self-inflicted causes.
This course combines essential skills and knowledge of the field of injury prevention followed by a focus on several key subject areas, examining current issues within each. A major course theme will be on road traffic injuries, with a focus on how injury patterns are influenced by societal health inequities and what injury prevention from a “safe systems” perspective leading with equity and community engagement looks like. The course looks at injury control holistically and as a system where the concept of “accidental injury” is challenged. Several current trends associated with the COVID pandemic will be covered, such as the increase in motor vehicle injuries, transportation occupational exposures, firearm deaths, and pedestrian deaths.
Course activities include discussion and critique of key readings, web-based and observational assignments, and a short paper and presentation by each student on a mutually agreed injury topic. Both graduate and undergraduate students welcome (undergraduates request permission from instructor), including students from public health and other campus academic areas. Download Course PDF.
Course Aims
- Review and critically examine data sources and research methods
- Understand size and scope of injury, including social costs, financial burden, and compensatory mechanisms
- Review methods of Injury Surveillance (ICD codes, measuring exposure, risk assessment, and adaptation to emerging problems)
- Understand injury patterns through the lens of social and economic gradients and demographics, and injury prevention from a “safe systems” perspective leading with equity and community engagement
- Review and evaluate injury prevention strategies, with emphasis on system level approaches
Topics for Fall 2024
- Overview (definition, scope of the burden of injury, sources of data, systems approach to injury prevention and control)
- Safe System approaches to injury prevention, addressing inequities, and intersectionality in injury impacts
- Motor vehicles (a leading cause of U.S. injury deaths)
- Pedestrian, bicyclist, micromobility injury (critical issue in mode shift to walking, biking, personal transportation)
- Firearms (a leading cause of U.S. injury deaths, including homicide, suicide, and unintentional)
Instructors
Glenn Shor, PhD, MPP, gshor@berkeley.edu
CalOSHA, California Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (retired)
Continuing Lecturer, UC Berkeley School of Public Health
Megan Wier, MPH
Assistant Director, City of Oakland - Department of Transportation
Lecturer, UC Berkeley School of Public Health
Funding is provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).