The only substantial way in which A&E attendances can be reduced is through accident prevention, the chief executive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents set out in his message to the safety charity’s annual meeting last week.

Given the scale of the problem, no child or young person mortality reduction programme can be complete without having accident prevention as its top priority, Tom Mullarkey will say.

Despite the existence of preventable years of life lost (PrYLL - a measure of preventable, early death) for three years, Mr Mullarkey will say few people in the medical professions have considered or adopted it. “Accidents are one of the top three major issues in public health, and not the peripheral one they have been consigned to in recent decades.” he says in the RoSPA Annual Review 2014/15.

He also welcomes “good news on the prevention front” after Simon Stevens, the CEO of the NHS, made it a core objective in his Five Year Forward Plan.

PrYLL* was developed to create a single insightful measure to help everyone prioritise public health.

Accident prevention is the number one issue until people reach their 70s, when preventable cancers take over.

To show the scale of the problem, the charity has produced a series of graphs, which reveal that accidents are the biggest preventable killer of people, peaking at age 10-14, where they account for 75 per cent of preventable mortality.

Mr Mullarkey said: “Firstly, by using mortality data, we have demonstrated that accidents are the biggest preventable killer of the young, peaking at age 10-14, where they account for 75 per cent of preventable mortality.”

He continued: “At serious morbidity level (using hospital admissions as the index), the pattern was repeated, only more so. Preventable serious morbidity peaks in the 0-4 range with more than 90 per cent of admissions being caused by accidents. The same implication on reduction programmes applies for serious morbidity. And at less serious morbidity levels, (using A&E attendances as the index), accidents average around 75 per cent of all preventable attendances, peaking in the 0-4 range with over 98 per cent and again later in the elderly at around 60 per cent in the 70-84 ranges.

“If prevention is better than cure and prevention is itself the cure for many of the demand-management ills in our hospitals, surely now is the time to take this subject seriously, resource it properly and reduce the enormous physical, emotional and structural costs on our society. If not now, when?”

* The Preventable Years of Life Lost concept is an analytical tool which merged preventability in mortality (Pr), with premature mortality (Years of Life Lost or YLL), to create a single insightful measure to help everyone prioritise public health (PrYLL).