Promoting children's home safety.

Abstract

Home accidents are the main cause of death and morbidity in early childhood. Working-class children are at greatest risk. A study in an inner city area of the effects of a national television campaign about child accident prevention and of a locally designed health education initiative showed that 55% of families with young children in the study area did not watch any of the television programmes. Only 9% of a group specially encouraged to watch the programmes took any action to make their homes safer. In a comparable group who also received a home visit at which specific advice was given 60% took action to make their homes safer. The families studied were well aware before the television campaign of the importance and preventability of children's accidents. The problems disadvantaged families face are therefore not ones of ignorance or apathy about hazards but practical difficulties in converting their concern into action. Administrative arrangements must be developed for providing health workers-especially health visitors -with detailed local information to pass on to parents. IntroductionFor children over 1 year of age in England and Wales accidents are the main cause of death, morbidity, and the emergency uptake of primary and secondary health care services.'-4 Deaths due to accidents in children have a steeper social-class gradient

Prevention of childhood poisoning in the home: overview of systematic reviews and a systematic review of primary studies

“…This included six RCTs (Baudier et al, 1988;Clamp & Kendrick, 1998;Colver, Hutchinson, & Judson, 1982;Gielen et al, 2007;Paul, Sanson-Fisher, & Redman, 1994;Watson et al, 2005) and one CBA (Schwarz, Grisso, Miles, Holmes, & Sutton, 1993), evaluating interventions providing safety education (OR 1.61, 95% CI 1.10À2.36 (Gielen et al, 2007)) and safety education plus equipment, with effect sizes ranging from RR 1.15 95% CI 1.03À1.28 (Clamp & Kendrick, 1998) to OR 14.30 95% CI 4.22À18.46 (Colver et al, 1982. The remaining 18 studies (see Table 4) evaluating a range of interventions including safety education, tailored safety education, safety education plus equipment found no significant difference in safe storage of medicines between treatment groups.…”

“…Of the 31 primary studies, six reported significantly more intervention group families stored household and other products safely. Four RCTs (Colver et al, 1982;Hendrickson, 2002;Paul et al, 1994;Watson et al, 2005) provided safety education plus equipment and home safety inspections with effect sizes ranging from OR 1.31 95% CI 1.07À1.60 (Watson et al, 2005) to OR 15.79, 95% CI 4.65À53.62 (Hendrickson, 2005). One RCT provided safety education plus equipment (OR 2.21 95% CI 1.40À3.51 (Woolf et al, 1992)) and one RCT gave home safety counselling and safety equipment with specific injury focussed instructions in the ED prior to discharge (OR 2.58 95% CI 1.12À5.94) (Posner, Hawkins, GarciaEspana, & Durbin, 2004).…”

Public beliefs about the preventability of unintentional injury deaths

“…The largest proportion of respondents (46%) instead endorsed, 'Most injuries can be prevented.' In another investigation from the UK, when mothers were asked, 'Do you think that children's accidents are mostly just bad luck or mostly could be prevented,' 89% of respondents replied, 'Mostly could be prevented' (Colver et al, 1982).…”

Using the Media to Tackle the Health Divide: Future Directions

“…These conclusions suggested a limited role for the media, although the review does identify a number of interventions which had a successful media component (e.g. McAvoy & Raza,1991, Colver, Hutchinson & Judson, 1982.…”