Standards provide an agreed baseline for the practice of casualty recording that will enable more actors to access, trust, use and/or share the data produced by casualty recorders.
These standards are not meant to be used as a strict operational guidance, but rather to encourage casualty recorders to consider key aspects of good practice and how these can be applied to their own casualty-recording projects. They aim to be implementable by all in the field and can be exceeded, while they should always be strived towards in the first instance. They have been created to help practitioners of casualty recording to adapt and, where relevant, improve the way they work, to move towards greater harmonisation of practice worldwide. They are designed to establish a standard of practice that can and should be applied across the field, whilst respecting its diversity of actors, methods and approaches. These standards also aim to help make casualty data more straightforward to use and share.
Standards for Casualty Recording, 2016, p. 2