Taking Vehicle Safety on the Road
 Becoming a parent changes the way we view the world, including a heightened awareness of the potential dangers and threats lurking around each corner. Parents invest an uncalculated amount of time looking for ways to ensure their children's safety and wellbeing. What most don't realize is that the greatest risk to children can be prevented through some fairly simple measures.
The leading cause of death and disability for Canadian children is injury. In 2004, in Canada alone, 90 children died and 631 were seriously injured as a result of road crashes (Transport Canada, 2004). Sadly, the majority of these deaths and injuries could have been prevented with the effective use of safety seats in vehicles.
Dr. Anne Snowdon, associate professor with the University of Windsor's Faculty of Nursing, is working hard to get this message out to parents. She and Dr. Andrew Howard, a trauma surgeon from the Hospital for Sick Children are the lead researchers on a four-year, $1.7-million research initiative, supported by AUTO21 and DaimlerChrysler Canada, to look at how parents use child safety seats.
"Injuries from road crashes are tremendously preventable," says Snowdon. "Past research indicates if parents had properly restrained their children, if the children had been seated correctly, deaths could have been prevented 71 per cent of the time and serious injuries could have been prevented in 67 per cent of cases.”
According to Snowdon's research, the problem for Canadian parents is not motivation, it’s education – the necessary knowledge. Canadian parents use or attempt to use safety systems 90 per cent of the time, but only succeed in using them correctly about 15 per cent of the time.
"The most worrisome mistake made by parents is transitioning children out of the appropriate safety-seat at far too early an age."
One of Snowdon's research initiatives was to develop an intervention program to educate parents. This program was first developed and tested in four Ontario cities. When her research team measured the program's effectiveness in Ontario, the numbers demonstrated a very significant increase in parent’s knowledge of using the correct type of seat, based on height, weight, and in the case of infants, age.
This program is now being deployed to six Canadian provinces and addresses a wide range of vehicle safety issues at a national level. The research team has partnered with Transport Canada to develop and implement a new methodology for their next national survey of vehicle safety system use in Canada.
The method will include observing parents in their vehicles (in parking lots) and inspecting how children are sitting in their seats, and getting height and weight data, seat data and the location of the seat within the vehicle.
"This will allow us to gather much more detailed information about how we can support parents' effective use of safety seats for their children. Of course, we will want to be helpful and supportive – not punitive," says Snowdon referring to the method of gathering data.
She is currently working with the University of Toronto and the Canadian Institute for Scientific Exchange Programs (CISEPO) to take this road safety program to the Middle East and Africa. They are seeking $23.6 million to fund a global initiative (currently in the proposal stage) which will partner Snowdon's research group with the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, the University of Toronto, and Universities in Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Kenya and South Africa.
According to the World Health Organization's 2004 World Health Report, 3,200 people die every day worldwide as a result of road crash injuries. It's also estimated that more than 50 million people experience disabling injuries every year due to road crashes (WHO, 2004).
"If current trends continue, by 2020 road vehicle crashes will be the third-leading cause of death, outdistancing infections, diseases, terrorism and war. We can't just say we've found answers that work for Canada, we need to bring this knowledge to the global community" says Snowdon.
“I'd like to see Canada as a world-class leader working with developing countries to accomplish a reduction in road crashes and improving road safety."
Snowdon hopes to realize one more long-term outcome from her research program: the mobilization of the Canadian health care system (and the nursing workforce in particular) to take on the challenge of preventing injuries in children due to road crash injuries.
In the current health care system, parents must provide proof of immunization when putting their children in school. Why not require certification of injury prevention training before letting parents put them in a moving vehicle?
"We need a systematic approach to injury-prevention in children – we just don’t have it. If we could train nurses how to check if a child is in the correct seat, then they can take this training into community settings (schools, hospitals, and doctor's offices).
"I'd like to see it taken to the level where every emergency unit, every family physician, every school teacher, every nurse and every parenting program makes injury prevention a priority and a focus for our children in Canada." |  |
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