Motor-vehicle occupant injury: strategies for increasing use of child safety seats, increasing use of safety belts, and reducing alcohol-impaired driving.

The Task Force on Community Preventive Services has conducted systematic reviews of interventions designed to increase use of child safety seats, increase use of safety belts, and reduce alcohol-impaired driving. The Task Force strongly recommends the following interventions: laws requiring use of child safety seats, distribution and education programs for child safety seats, laws requiring use of safety belts, both primary and enhanced enforcement of safety belt use laws, laws that lower the legal blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limit for adult drivers to 0.08%, laws that maintain the minimum legal drinking age at 21 years, and use of sobriety checkpoints. The Task Force recommends communitywide information and enforcement campaigns for use of child safety seats, incentive and education programs for use of child safety seats, and a lower legal BAC for young drivers (in the United States, those under the minimum legal drinking age). This report provides additional information regarding these recommendations, briefly describes how the reviews were conducted, and provides information to help apply the interventions locally.

Scope and organization of the Guide to Community Preventive Services. The Task Force on Community Preventive Services.

BACKGROUND: The diverse nature of the target audience (i.e., public health decision-makers) for the Guide to Community Preventive Services: Systematic Reviews and Evidence-Based Recommendations (the Guide) dictates that it must be broad in scope. In addition, for the Guide to be most useful for its target audience, its organization and format must be carefully considered. DETERMINING THE SCOPE OF THE GUIDE: Healthy People objectives and actual causes of death were used to determine the contents of the Guide. A priority setting exercise resulted in the selection of 15 topics for systematic reviews using the following criteria: burden of the problem, preventability, relationship to other public health initiatives, usefulness of the package of topics selected and level of current research and intervention activity in public and private sectors. Interventions within each topic target state and local levels and include population-based strategies, individual strategies in other than clinical settings and group strategies. ORGANIZATION OF THE GUIDE: The Guide is organized into: Introduction, Reviews and Recommendations (three sections: Changing Risk Behaviors, Reducing Diseases, Injuries, or Impairments, and Addressing Environmental and Ecosystem Challenges), Appendixes, and Indexes. DISCUSSION: The scope and organization of the Guide were determined using relevant public health criteria and expert opinion to provide a useful and accessible document to a broad target audience. While the final contents of the Guide may change during development, the working table of contents described in this paper provides a framework for development of the Guide and conveys its scope and intention.