National Center for Injury Prevention and Control

**About CDC’s Injury Center** For 30 years, CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (Injury Center) has been a leader in protecting Americans from injury and violence so that individuals, families, and communities can be safe, healthy, and thriving. We work proactively with our partners to track trends, conduct research, raise awareness, and implement prevention programs. **Our Approach** Like diseases, injuries are preventable—they do not occur at random. CDC’s Injury Center uses the same scientific methods to prevent injuries that have been used to prevent disease: carefully describing the problem through surveillance, studying factors that increase or decrease risk for injury, designing and evaluating intervention strategies that target these risk factors, and taking steps to ensure that proven strategies are implemented in communities nationwide. To solve public health problems—including injuries—CDC uses a systematic process called the public health approach. This approach has four steps: define the problem, identify risk and protective factors, develop and test prevention strategies, and assure widespread adoption of effective injury prevention principles and strategies.