Prevention of infant and childhood injury through an active pediatrician participated model

Background Reducing children's accident injury is an important public health issue. Pediatricians as first-line healthcare professionals for children and young infants, should be mobilized to participate the childhood accidental injury prevention. The purposes were to (1) educate pediatricians regarding accidental injury prevention.(2) evaluate the effects of children's injury prevention educated by pediatrician in their pediatric clinics and hospitals. Methods The parents with 0-48 month-old children were recruited. Checklists for home safety were set up according to the age of children: 0~12, 13~30 and 31~48 months old. It included the topics of home safety, traffic safety, burning injury, falling down injury, drowning and asphyxia. The participating pediatricians were trained first then they were assigned to educate the parents. We designed educational programs to pediatricians for children's injury prevention.. Results Totally 45 pediatricians were enrolled and 269 families with children and young infants were also recruited (147 in study group and 122 in control group ). The improvement of knowledge, attitude and behavior in the study group is 9.28%, 8.64% and 43.41% respectively and 8.06%, 4.55% and 32.62% in the control group. Eighty-five percent of the pediatricians will offer childhood injury prevention program. Conclusions and suggestions In comparison with the parents in the control group, the parents received counseling from pediatrician had improvement toward children and infants injury prevention. The improvement included both parents' knowledge and attitude. We thus conclude that active pediatrician participation is important for effective prevention of accidental injury during early childhood and infants.