| Popis: |
The impact of injuries on the U.S. Armed Forces is dramatic, resulting in death, disability, hospitalizations, lost duty time, and reduced military readiness. Injuries are the leading health problem impacting U.S. military force readiness today. Approximately 26% of hospitalizations, 60% of permanent disabilities, and 80% of all active duty deaths are caused by injuries. Injuries impact the strength and ability of our Armed Forces to effectively respond to their mission, as well as levy tremendous annual costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars against the operating budgets of all the services. The Atlas of Injuries in the Armed Forces published in 1999 unequivocally documents the extent of preventable orthopedic injuries and provides concrete recommendations to reduce injuries. Yet to date there have been few successful programs that have incorporated these proposals to reduce the incidence and prevalence of common orthopedic injuries such as knee and back injuries. Organizational culture, insufficient resources, lack of awareness of the extent of the injury problem, injury classification difficulties, and inadequate measures of the readiness impact are some of the root causes for the lack of successful system- wide injury prevention programs. Over a two-year period from 1999 to 2001,1 created an automated injury surveillance program at a major divisional post. I successfully hypothesized that an automated injury surveillance system that provided simple unit injury rates to unit commanders would increase injury awareness and would increase use of existing injury prevention resources. The results of this experience combined with a survey of Army War College students to examine leaders attitudes concerning injuries will explicate some of the institutional barriers affecting injury prevention in the US Army. I propose development of an injury surveillance system that quantifies lost training time from data received from an automated profile system. |
