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

Jung, Jae Yun; Kim, Do Kyun; Lee, Eui Jung; Kim, Yu Jin; Shin, Sang Do; Kwak, Young Ho

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 (< 1 yr, n=15), young children (< 5 yr, n=56) and old children (> 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.