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SYNERGY

Vol.13 No. 1
Spring 2001

HTC has been working in Jamaica for the past three years as part of a Citizen Security and Justice Program developed by the Jamaican government and the Inter-American Development Bank. The project began in 1998 when HTC integrated a Violence-Related Injury Surveillance System (VRISS) into the computerized admitting/discharge/transfer processes at the 450-bed Kingston Public Hospital to allow patient information on violence-related injuries to be recorded.

In collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the system is gathering data on violence-related injuries treated in the accident and emergency departments of all hospitals in North America and the Caribbean. The aim is to better understand who is at risk, where the incidents occur, who is perpetrating violence within society, and what the cost is to the health sector.

Since then, the system has been expanded to include the surveillance of all injuries and has been extended to four other hospitals in Jamaica; soon it will be operating in 18 more hospitals using HTC's Patient Administration System software.

Now known as the Jamaica Injury Surveillance System (JISS), the data collection program allows injuries treated in hospital A&E departments to be categorized as unintentional or accidental, violence-related, attempted suicide, or motor vehicle-related.

According to Dr. Elizabeth Ward, chief of epidemiology in the Jamaica Ministry of Health, the major advantages of the HTC software include "its ability to capture specialized data, for example, injury data, and its ability to have access to the patient administration system data in one computerized format that can be merged at a central level." This decreases the turnaround time for A&E and discharge data. She adds: "The patient administration system has proven to be a cost-effective means of gathering health data."

The information now being gathered by the JISS is being used to shape Ministry policy, and to plan prevention and intervention programs. New studies can be implemented at any time without programming changes to the system. A study on asthma is already scheduled.

The health ministry has produced a comprehensive manual on use of the JISS, an external report writer has been used to gather and analyze the data. For more information, contact Dr. Ward by e-mail at the Jamaica Ministry of Health's Health Promotion and Protection Division: eward@epi.org.jm

Article reproduced with permission of CSIH