ISTV – Resources for Policy Makers

National framework

The Cardiff Model (often also referred to as ISTV) was officially introduced in England in 2014, when the Health and Social Care Information Centre, on behalf of the Standardisation Committee for Care Information, published the new Standard on Information Sharing to Tackle Violence (ISTV). Under the Standard, major NHS Emergency Departments in England were required to collect and share non-confidential/non-disclosive data about people attending following an incident involving violent crime. The data is to be shared with Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) and covers the following information:

time and date of incident
time and date of arrival in ED
specific location of where the incident took place
the primary means of assault (i.e. weapon or body part used)

The programme was developed through collaboration between the National College of Policing, the Association of Chief Police Officers, Public Health England, the College of Emergency Medicine and NHS England. The Department of Health oversaw and sponsored its implementation.

The Department of Health secured funding for a further project, the Violence Reduction Nurse project, whose aim was to support collection of ISTV data across EDs in England. This project covered the cost of 12 Violence Reduction Nurses who, alongside their other duties, worked to set up violent assault information collection systems within their own EDs while supporting other hospitals in their region to also adopt the information standard.

More recently there has been further standardisation of data collection, including injury data, in EDs through the Emergency Care Data Set that was introduced from 2018.

For more information on the Information Standard that sets out the ISTV data requirements and expectations of EDs see: NHS Standard: ISB1594

ISTV data to inform targeted policing

In the extract below, from the article “Targeted Policing” published on the Police Professional website, experts in the field of violence prevention explain how ISTV data can be used to inform targeted policing and reveal ‘invisible’ violence hotspots and gang crime activity.

Read the full article