Use of a violent injury surveillance system in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

Introduction. Current surveillance systems that exist to document violence and injury trends lack the ability to decipher a cause and effect relationship or to provide meaningful, objective data to researchers and policy makers. The objective of this study is to introduce a model of a comprehensive, linked data collection system and to demonstrate its usefulness by answering research questions that are pertinent to public health practitioners. These questions entail describing the victims of violence, determining the rate and characteristics of firearm injury recidivists and determining whether a catastrophic event impacts violence.;Methods. Data for each of the analyses will be taken from the Allegheny County Injury Surveillance System (ACISS). ACISS is a linked data collection module that utilizes data from the coroner, vital statistics, medical records, law enforcement and crime labs. Data is collected on homicide, suicide and nonfatal firearm injuries that occur to Allegheny County residents in Allegheny County. Overall, the data used in this manuscript will encompass the years 1998 through 2001, though each analysis will utilize a different subset of the data.;Results. Characteristics of the victim and offender as well as the circumstances surrounding the crimes were available through this surveillance system. Four years of data were utilized to follow firearm injury victims through the hospitals and coroner to ascertain the number of repeat victims in Allegheny County, as well as to assess characteristics such as length of stay and charges. Finally, the surveillance system provided data used to determine that the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 impacted violence in the community.;Conclusions. Data provided in the Allegheny County Surveillance System enables researchers to answer questions that would otherwise remain unanswered were the data sources to remain separate. We were able to monitor trends over time as well as ascertain the impact of a specific event. Data systems such as this will allow public health researchers to discern complex relationships and circumstances surrounding injuries and violence related incidents through the collection objective data.