In response to numerous requests from Member States and professional groups for education in injury prevention and control, WHO’s Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention, in collaboration with some of the world's best experts in the field, developed a modular curriculum for the teaching of core and advanced public health competencies in the area of injury prevention and control.
The main goal of TEACH-VIP is to train students, professionals and practitioners in the field of public health to better apply key injury prevention and control principles, to contribute to the development of preventive programs and policies, design effective surveillance systems, evaluate intervention programs and policies, and collect and assess injury data.
While the curriculum has been developed with a primary training audience of public health students in mind, it is also expected that this curriculum can be used for allied medical and nursing students, injury prevention and response practitioners, health professionals, staff within government agencies and other relevant and interested parties. It is anticipated that those making use of the materials will select the lessons most appropriate to the needs of their training audience, and that the materials will be translated and adapted to a wide variety of contexts as necessary.
The course objectives are defined as follows:
- To identify the basic principles of injury prevention, control and safety promotion
- To differentiate basic methods to study injury problems in the community
- To diagnose problems from a multidisciplinary perspective
- To design, implement and evaluate injury prevention and safety promotion interventions
- To identify and compare effective injury prevention and control interventions (products, programs, policies)
- To identify relevant sources of information (scientific literature, guidelines and recommendations, summaries of research, web sites) and critically appraise them
- To advocate for injury prevention in communities
- To practice injury prevention control and safety promotion based on universally accepted ethical principles