Fall 2025: Public Health Injury Prevention and Control
Public Health PH285a
2 units | Course #31020
Friday, 12pm - 2pm | Berkeley Way West 1206
Course Overview
“Accidents” don’t “just happen.” And they contribute to significant preventable death and injury each year. 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. Presently, public health efforts to prevent injuries are very limited compared to chronic and infectious disease prevention initiatives. Injury is broadly 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. Injury contexts and factors include occupational exposures, the transportation system, firearms, violence, war, and self-inflicted causes.
This course combines essential skills and knowledge of the field of injury prevention with a focus on several key subject areas, examining current issues within each. The course looks at injury control holistically and as a system where the concept of “accidental injury” is challenged. A major course theme is injuries in the transportation system, with a focus on how injury patterns are influenced by societal health inequities and on injury prevention efforts from a “safe systems” perspective leading with equity, interdisciplinary partnerships, and a public health approach. The course also covers work-related (occupational) injuries both in transportation and outside, and discusses compensation and liability issues that impact prevention.
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, transportation engineering, city planning, public policy, medicine, social work, and other campus academic areas.
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 public health
- Review and evaluate injury prevention strategies, with emphasis on system level approaches
- Examine who pays for injuries and implications for prevention
- Review of current political challenges to data collection and analysis of injury trends
Topics for Fall 2025
- Safe System approaches to injury prevention, addressing inequities and intersectionality in injury impacts
- Transportation-related injuries - motor vehicles (a leading cause of U.S. injury deaths), pedestrian, bicyclist, micromobility injury (critical issue in mode shift to walking, biking, personal transportation)
- Trends in occupational injuries and fatalities
- Medical error in provision of health and hospital care
- Firearms (a leading cause of U.S. injury deaths, including homicide, suicide, and unintentional injury and death)
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, mwier@berkeley.edu
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).