Emergency Department-based Injury Prevention Program for Children's Injuries at Home-Pilot Study

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: To evaluate the effectiveness of an emergency department (ED)-based educational program for pediatric injury prevention at home. METHODS: We provided educational sessions for pediatric injury prevention at home for 113 caregivers of children who presented to an urban pediatric ED for evaluation of acute unintentional injuries. After completing a structured questionnaire by face-to-face interviews, caregivers were given comprehensive home safety education and recommendations for purchasing safety equipments. The post-educational questionnaires about satisfaction of education, behavioral changes and purchase of safety equipments were collected after 3 weeks by telephone follow-up calls. All replies were answered by 9-point scoring system. RESULTS: We divided caregivers into three groups by the age of their children, infants ( 5 yr, n=42). On pre-education questionnaire, all groups showed the common tendency of higher scores of safety behavior than possession of safety equipments. A total of 86(76.1%) caregivers answered the post-education survey with a high satisfaction score of 7.6. The rate of behavioral changes of care givers for injury prevention was higher (mean 6.2%, range 0~29.1%), than the rate of purchase the safety equipments (mean 5.7%, range 0~14.8%). Independent t-test of the data showed a tendency that the caregivers with better safety behavior scores by the initial survey purchased more safety equipments (p=0.368). CONCLUSION: The satisfaction of the educational session for injury prevention given in the ED was high, but behavioral changes and purchase of safety instruments were not significantly improved.