About Child Injury (CIPIC) HIT

The Child Injury Health Integration Team (HIT) is a team of nurses, doctors, practitioners and scientists, working together to reduce the number of unintentional injuries to children across the Bristol area. They are also aiming to improve the outcome for patients when those injuries do happen, and reduce the burden that avoidable childhood injuries place on overstretched NHS resources. More than 14,000 children were treated in emergency departments and minor injury units in Bristol during 2011.

Each year in England, around 452,000 children under five attend an emergency department following an unintentional injury, 40,000 are admitted to hospital and about 60 die. Most of these injuries are potentially preventable.

The team plans to tackle the problem at both ends of the scale. At one end, the high volume of usually preventable minor injuries, such as falls, cuts, bangs to the head, that commonly go to emergency departments but don’t usually have a long term impact on the child. At the other, the much smaller numbers of very serious injuries such as road traffic accident victims, major head injuries and severe burns, that need extensive hospital treatment and rehabilitation.

From establishing methods to collect and link local injury information to researching how best to support parents to prevent injuries in the home, the Child Injury HIT aims to help prevent, treat and reduce the impact on a child’s life of childhood injury.

The full name of Child Injury HIT is the Child Injury Prevention and Injury Care (CIPIC) Health Integration Team.

Aims and objectives

The overall aim of the CIPIC HIT is to help Bristol set the national standard for integrating prevention, care and rehabilitation across children’s trauma services.

Through research and improved communication and interagency collaboration, the HIT aims to:

• Improve the quality and usefulness of local injury data
• Increase our knowledge of what works to prevent injuries
• Optimise the quality and effectiveness of the care of injured children
• Address the learning needs of parents, students, practitioners and professionals

Who’s involved

The leading experts in child injury prevention and care in Bristol are involved in the team. The team’s director is Julie Mytton, Associate Professor of Child Health at UWE who also leads the prevention workstream.

Find out more about who’s involved.

Projects and activities

The HIT is bidding for funding for research, education and care pathway redesign programmes that will help Bristol set the national standard for integrating prevention, care and rehabilitation across children’s trauma services.

The team is carrying out research and innovation to prevent injuries and improve care at each stage of the patient journey, from the first response from parents and the emergency services through to hospital emergency departments, intensive care, ward care and rehabilitation to integrate children back into their families and usual activities.

Education is a vital part of the HIT’s work. Working with local children’s centres the team has been researching ways to support parents to improve safety in the home. Funding will allow the HIT to develop and expand its education programme with a range of partners, including young people, parents, police, fire and rescue services, the voluntary sector and road safety officers.

Key projects for the team include:

• Integrating rehabilitation services. Some children’s services will be moving from North Bristol NHS Trust to University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust in May 2014. We plan to work with the rehabilitation staff from both teams before and after the move to support them to develop services that meet the needs of children experiencing trauma
• Bristol has won £1.5 million in funding from the Healing Foundation to establish a national children’s burns research centre to study how to prevent burn injuries and improve healing and rehabilitation. The HIT hopes that further funding will help tackle other types of injury in a similar way.
• Researchers in Bristol are collaborating on a national study called Keeping Children Safe at Home. This study, led by Nottingham University, aims to find the best advice about preventing accidents in young children at home, and to work with Children’s Centres to find suitable ways of passing on this advice to parents.

Contacts

To find out more, please contact:

• Julie Mytton, Associate Professor in Child Health: [email protected]

CIPIC at the HIT conference

CIPIC presented this poster (PDF) at the 2018 Bristol Health Partners Health Integration Team conference.

View the 2015 video