Cardiff Model academic honoured with award for public health innovation

The Prince Mahidol Award is offered to an individual for outstanding innovation, leadership, and achievement in advancing population health.

Professor Shepherd’s work on the ‘Cardiff Model’ was developed from the finding that up to 75% of violent incidents requiring hospital treatment through emergency departments were not known to law enforcement agencies.  From Professor Shepherd’s original observation as a trainee maxillofacial surgeon, further study in collaboration with law colleagues at Bristol University confirmed that law enforcement agencies are unaware of most violence that results in emergency hospital treatment, mainly because the injured people chose not to report the incidents to police.  This work provided the theory of change that underpins the Cardiff Model.

The Cardiff Model is now in use on five continents.  From initial adoption within the UK, replication and evaluation of the Cardiff Model has taken place in the Australia, Canada, Colombia, Jamaica, the Netherlands, South Africa and the United States of America  Recently, the United States’ Center for Disease Control and Prevention established a toolkit to enable more cities across their network to implement the model and benefit from its approach.

Evaluations of situations where the Cardiff Model has been implemented have identified a 42% reduction in violence-related hospital admissions.  Sharing of Cardiff Model data such as precise location of violence, time, date gathered by hospital emergency departments with law enforcement and city government agencies has substantially increased identification of violence hotspots. Adoption of the Cardiff Model in London has enabled identification of hotspots relating to gang violence, locations of drug dealing and misuse.

Previous winners of The Prince Mahidol Award have included Professor Ian Frazer, whose research led to the creation of the HPV vaccine, and Professor David Mabey whose fieldwork and studies in Trachoma, a common cause of blindness, have significantly contributed to the expected eradication of this disease which causes blindness by 2025.