CDC Injury Center –Success Stories Portal

Background: Injuries are a significant problem in the United States (US). Regardless of gender, race, or economic status, injuries remain a leading cause of death for Americans of all ages, accounting for more than 170,000 deaths in 2005. In addition, millions of Americans survive injuries each year through successful injury prevention and response methods. Documenting successful injury prevention and response interventions and their impact in an efficient, compelling way, has not been possible -- until now. At CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (CDC’s Injury Center), one of our roles is to improve public health practice and foster translation of research into practice. In this role, the Injury Center in partnership with Banyan Communications has developed a web-based portal to enable injury prevention and response practitioners to develop and disseminate success stories.

Program background: Public health practitioners within state and local injury-related programs often do not take the time needed to document and share their experiences. As a result, sharing about best practices and lessons learned does not occur regularly or systematically. The CDC Injury Center success stories portal provides a creative and innovative venue for sharing this critical knowledge among practitioners. In addition, resulting success stories enable practitioners to inform national, state, and/or community leaders about effective program strategies and policies that will help injury prevention programs continue to persevere so that people can live to their full potential. Using the portal, injury prevention and response practitioners will be able to develop timely, complete, and accurate success stories about the impact their projects have made. Additionally, the stories, created by CDC Injury Center grantees, will then be integrated and archived by injury topic and will be readily available for viewing via the CDC Injury Center website.

Evaluation Methods and Results: CDC grantees were interviewed about their programs, activities and research to inform the criteria for development of the worksheet, which helps users of the portal, to structure and outline their success story as well as the success story template. The portal’s content, and resource tools including the Worksheet, Success Story templates, and image library were reviewed and approved by subject matter experts and senior staff at the CDC. Once the portal is launched, the Injury Center plans to measure the effectiveness and quality of stories received by keeping track of number of stories submitted into the CDC searchable archive. Web statistics such as page views, time spent on various pages, entry and exit paths will also be able to be documented once the page is live on CDC’s server. The portal also contains an open feedback mechanism which provides portal users the ability to comment on the portal and make suggestions for improvement.

Conclusions: The success stories, developed and available in this portal, may guide future global, national, state and local efforts to prevent and respond to injury incidents more effectively.

Implications for research and/or practice: By demonstrating and sharing the value and impact of a program or research through success stories, practitioners can leverage additional resources and expand partnerships.