Reducing the burden of injury is an international health goal, one that requires an interdisciplinary perspective. Injuries, whether self-inflicted, inflicted by others, or unintentional, have one thing in common: They are largely preventable. behaviours that give rise to violence and injury are amenable to preventive intervention, just as are many of the behaviours that give rise to diseases. Thus, behavioural science is an integral part of a comprehensive injury prevention strategy. Applications of behavioural science to injury prevention lagged behind other approaches during the last half of the 20th century. Despite recognition by injury control professionals of the importance of behavioural research in injury prevention, behavioural solutions to preventing injury were deemphasized until recently. Historically, little scholarly attention has been paid to understanding determinants of injury-related behaviours or how to initiate and sustain behavioural changes. Interventions often seemed to have been based on simplistic assumptions that changing people’s awareness about the injury problem would change their behaviour. Many authors have noted the need to improve behavioural interventions by using better empirical data about determinants of behaviour as well as theories and frameworks pertaining to change in health behaviour. A growing body of work is emerging that demonstrates the positive impact of using behavioural science approaches in order to both understand and reduce injury risk behaviours. In this paper, we describe the role of behaviour change in injury prevention and illustrate how the application of selected behaviour-change theories to injury problems, within the context of a health promotion framework, can contribute to the enhancement of injury prevention programs. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting