Safe Community in different settings

Abstract

This paper describes the Safe Community concept and how communities aspired to safety through a structured, collaborative approach rather than a community that is already perfectly safe. The Safe Community movement started in Sweden at the end of the 1980s and was based on community-based injury prevention activities. Safe Communities are the communities that meet a set of 12 criteria (later changed to six indicators) set out by the WHO Collaborating Centre (WHO CC) on Community Safety Promotion at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. The communities may apply to the WHO CC to be designated as an official member of the WHO International Safe Community Network. To date, 83 communities around the world have been designated as members of the Safe Community Network, ranging in population from 1000 to nearly 2 million. Lidkjöping in Sweden was the first designated safe community in 1989 and Rapla in Estonia was the last, designated in October 2004. The movement recognizes that it is the people who not only live, learn, work and play in a community but also best understand their community's specific problems, needs, assets and capacities. Their involvement and commitment are critical factors in identifying and mobilizing resources so as to create an effective, comprehensive and coordinated community-based action on unintentional and intentional injuries.

WHO Safe Communities – should we expand the definition of a ‘community’?

“…This process has been successful as it allows for the collective analysis of information by a group, bringing together the group's experience and knowledge in a cooperative manner that promotes local capacity. By engaging the community to develop contextspecific prevention strategies, community members are empowered in the decision-making process and their capacity for problem-solving can also be enhanced, along with the ability for collective decision-making and collective action (Rahim 2005).…”

Iranian Designated Safe Communities: A Quantitative Analysis

“…Engagement of community members in safety promotion programs shows that people not only live and work in the community, but also accept a social responsibility to identify the community's needs, problems, and potential to prevent injuries (19). sufficient and inconsistent evidence on the effectiveness of safe communities, which makes it difficult to draw a definite conclusion in this area (27).…”

“…Designated safe communities implement injury prevention programs in an intersectoral structure for safety promotion in all populations (9,19). In a study by Svanstrom et al on designated safe communities, established before 2005, inconsistency was reported in reports, approaches, and methods of safety promotion in communities (20).…”

Discourses on municipal protection and safety work prior to the introduction of the ‘Civil Protection Act Against Accidents’ and five years later

“…The ''Safe Community''-idea, was later incorporated in a strategy within the global network of the World Health Organisation (WHO) for injury prevention and within the national programme for injury prevention of the Swedish Public Health Institute. The basic idea in ''A Safe Community'' includes a series of criteria in such a community and has principles on how to put together the work within the structure and organisation existing in the municipality (Cho and Svanström, 2002;Green et al, 2001;Leung et al, 2004;Lindquist et al, 2004;Nielsen et al, 2006;Pain and Townshend, 2001;Rahim, 2005).…”

“…The WHO Safe Community network had been operating for 16 years in 2005, involving SCs in 16 countries, and the network has 15 affiliated support centres around the world (Rahim, 2005). Within the research into ''A Safe Community'', the strategy and its realisation describes municipalities and countries that have employed law enforcement as an important top-down strategy at the national level in combination with the bottom-up strategies within ''A Safe Community'' (Cho and Svanström, 2002;Leung et al, 2004;Welander et al, 2001).…”