To prevent child injury you must first understand the problem. This can be achieved by answering a few simple questions, such as:
This is often referred to as a needs assessment.
The answers to these questions will begin to tell you that child injuries are predictable and not random events and in fact that they can be prevented. The answers will also identify those factors that can be addressed in order to reduce child injury numbers and severity.
The information collected will help with:
The first step is to investigate the local child injury problem. When you do this you need to consider the problem from two perspectives - what does the community think and what does the data actually tell you?
What does the community think?
To find out what the community thinks and believes about child injury issues you will need to gather information. There are a number of ways you can gather that information such as:
What does the data actually tell you?
You will need to access and analyse local injury data. A range of sources exist. These may include hospital records, reported crime data, insurance claims, and Emergency Department presentations. As there is no single data set that will tell you everything you need to know about child injury, you will need to get information from various data sources.
At times you may find that the community is concerned about a different problem compared to what the actual injury data shows. Consequently you may need to address both locally identified priorities (those of greatest concern to the community) and those that the child injury data highlights too.
The local data can be used to identify which groups are at high or higher risk of child injury, (e.g. child scalds from hot tap water are occurring to young children less than 4 years and mainly in houses built before 1999). This level of detail about the injury problem can help you target your message to those who need it most.
The cause of child injury varies depending on a wide and diverse range of factors including age, development, gender, parent's income, geographical location and environmental surroundings [35] and usually involves the transfer of energy.
For example the impact of age and stage of development can be seen in the injury issue of children's falls. Falls are a leading cause of non-fatal injuries to children, but:
For further information about a child's age, stage of development and their safety risks look at the Child Development Chart from Birth.
Identifying the cause of the local injury problem is important in determining what you need to address.
For children, the majority of injuries occur in and around the home.[36] Identifying where injuries occur can determine what you do about the injury (e.g. the geographical location can change the cause of an injury). To illustrate this point, if we look at toddler drownings/near drownings; in rural regions they occur more commonly in dams, lakes and rivers whereas in metropolitan areas they occur more frequently in swimming pools and baths.[37]
Locations for injury can vary within one setting. For example, when you look at scalds from hot foods and drinks that happen in the home, there are two main locations where these injuries occur - the kitchen and living/dining areas. Strategies to reduce scalds can be different given the specific location, such as in the kitchen promoting the use of the back hotplate and in the living/dining area encouraging the use of placemats rather than tablecloths.
The time when an injury occurs offers some further information that can be used to plan and target strategies (e.g. time of day, day of week etc).
In all relevant deaths and Emergency Department presentations, the location and time of child injuries is collected. For further details on where and when injuries occur look at the range of Queensland Injury Surveillance Unit (QISU) Injury Bulletins.
In order to move onto Phase 2 Think and Plan it is important to summarise all of the information you have collected. The injury data and community perceptions should provide sufficient information to help guide you toward effective action including what policies are needed, what environmental changes are required and what else is needed to help prevent or minimise child injuries.[34]
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