When and where: Gold Coast, Australia, August 25-29, 2008
Expert groups represented: Injuries, mental disorders and illicit drugs, musculoskeletal diseases, alcohol, osteoporosis (risk factor), occupational risks (risk factor), collective violence (risk factor), intimate partner violence (risk factor), neurological disorders, global climate change (risk factor).
Attending injury expert group members: James Harrison, Kavi Bhalla, Jed Blore, Wendy Watson, Maria Segui-Gomez, Theo Vos, Rosana Norman, Louise Flood, Lyn March, Damian Hoy, Tim Driscoll.
What did we do:
- Formal presentations: Expert group leaders made short presentations reporting on their progress. The cluster leader (Theo Vos) reported on status of work within the central team. Various cross-cutting issues were discussed.
- Training: We also participated in training and exercises on several tools that are being used project wide. These included the use of DISMOD, comparative risk assessment, dealing with missing data, and conducting systematic reviews.
- James and Kavi had short meetings with the leaders of all expert groups that have a close connections with the work of the injury expert group.
- James, Kavi, Maria, and Wendy met with the cluster leader to discuss the conceptual mismatch between the architecture of the existing GBD project and our work on burden of injuries.
Key messages for the Injury expert group from this meeting:
- SCOPE OF WORK: The work of the injury expert group is different from other expert groups. While other expert groups are primarily engaged in conducting systematic reviews of the literature to derive estimates of disease incidence, prevalence and risk factors, the injury expert group has a much broader mandate which includes fresh analysis of data from administrative records (hospital, death registers, surveillance) and research studies. Unlike other expert groups, the injury expert group is also tackling many theoretical issues as embodied in the growing list of discussion papers.
- TIMING: There is a relatively small window of opportunity for the analytical results and the theoretical recommendations (discussion papers) from the GBD Injury expert group to impact the 2005 estimates. The central team is requesting first estimates of incidence of injuries in all regions by November 2008.
- The issues listed above (expanded role of the injury expert group, the timing crunch) coupled with the fact that we are under-resourced to be undertaking this work implies that we need a strategy for ensuring maximum effectiveness for the group. We (James and Kavi) propose that the group take a two-tier strategy to the work:
- Maximize input to the current GBD 2005 exercise: This requires being mindful of the GBD timeline and ensuring that the best possible knowledge at the time is summarized and provided to the central team at appropriate times.
- Maximize the impact on future GBD studies: This can be achieved by ensuring that the discussion papers get converted into peer-reviewed articles that comment on the shortcomings, strengths, and implications of the GBD 2005 methods and appear in print by the time the final GBD results are released (late 2010).