What information is available tends to focus on fatal injuries. So also most of the targets of EU- and national policies with respect to road traffic safety, safety at work, consumer safety, violence and suicide prevention have been primarily focused on the reduction of deaths. However, deaths are only one different aspect of the total injury problem; for every person killed, many more are seriously and permanently disabled and many more again suffer minor, short-term disabilities. Not only the costs of injury mortality but also the costs of morbidity are immense, not only in terms of lost economic opportunity and demands on national health budgets, but also in terms of personal suffering. It is now increasingly acknowledged that deaths are only one measure of the magnitude of the injury problem.

In fact, in many EU Member States deaths in road traffic or for instance at work, have been declining over the last several decades due in part to improvements in medical care (prompt emergency response, early diagnosis, and treatment capabilities) as well as to advances in road and vehicle design and in technology. In contrast to this development, non-fatal injuries are increasing in importance in terms of both societal and economic costs as well as loss of productivity. Consequently, there is a growing need for separate targets related to the reduction of non-fatal injuries, in particular those leading to permanent impairments. Such indicators are gradually being introduced at the EU level for target setting and for measuring progress in policies for road safety and for health and safety at work.

Much of the injury information generated up until now is not comparable between countries, and not between registers, due to the lack of harmonised methodology and classification. Injury surveillance in the EU �C and in most MSs �C can be characterized as operating on an incomplete puzzle of data sources that only provides a notion of the complete picture but lacks important details [3]. However these challenges can be met by using health based data that provide the ��cement�� to glue the jigsaw pieces of understanding the injury field together and will serve as common denominator for all policy sectors and MSs.

It is obvious that the hospital sector provides the best setting for collecting information as this information relates to the most severe cases (while less severe cases are treated by family doctors of school nurses for instance) and information can be obtained easily on a large number of cases at low cost (while surveys are expensive Entinostat and suffering serious deficiencies as regards the specificity of data obtained). Technological developments in medical administration and data linkage, also offers new opportunities for recording information that is also relevant for injury prevention.