News
Call for hospitals to share information on knife crime
18-Jul-08
Every hospital emergency department in England should share information about violent incidents with local crime reduction agencies in a bid to tackle knife crime, according to an editorial in the BMJ today.
Professor Jonathan Shepherd, director of the Violence Research Group at Cardiff University, says that allowing hospitals to share information on the location and times that violence occurs and the types of weapons used with the police could help to identify violence ‘hotspots’.
Police could then target the hotspots and act as a deterrent to committing violent crimes.
Emergency medicine consultants will also need to be directly involved in the partnership and should attend meeting with the police and local authority representatives, concludes Professor Shepherd.
sanjay.tanday@haymarket.com
BMJ
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