The Provincial Government has launched a first-of-its-kind Safety Dashboard which uses data from from trauma and emergency units, to inform policing priorities in specific areas.

Trauma and ER units log incident information, including all the details of the patients’ injury and their individual profile. The patient’s address is then geo-tagged to link up with hot-spot policing precincts.

This information is also shared with local law enforcement, the department of Social Development and all other relevant stakeholders.

The foundation of the dashboard is the Hospital Emergency Centre Triage and Information System (HECTIS). The HECTIS is a web-based data collection system for patients attending emergency centres across the Western Cape.

Using HECTIS data, the Safety Dashboard will track:

• When and where injuries occur;
• The mechanism of injury and the pattern of injury presentation over time;
• Patterns of trauma in particular populations such as gender or age groups over time;
• Patterns of trauma among pregnant women presenting at emergency centres; and
• Non-trauma presentations.

The director of Health Intelligence at the Western Cape Department of Health and wellness, Dr. Melvin Moodley, who presented the Safety Dashboard’s functions and capabilities to the media, says it’s all about breaking the cycle of violence.

Premier Alan Winde says the Safety Dashboard will provide real-time data to provincial safety stakeholders.

The dashboard is updated every 3 days and is being automated to further provide daily updates. It has been active since the end of March 2022 and is constantly being upgraded. We have further made it accessible to Western Cape safety stakeholders including the SAPS, the Department of Police Oversight and Community Safety and the City of Cape Town. We need real-time data to not only guide our deployments based on past incidents but also to anticipate where new hotspots may appear so that we can deploy the necessary resources – before lives are lost. While the release of the quarterly crime statistics helps to paint a picture of trends in criminal activity, it does not share real-time information, which is precisely what the Safety Dashboard sets out to do.