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Baby, Be Safe

An Evidence-Based Practice

Description

The Baby, Be Safe program provides individually tailored educational materials on child injury prevention for parents. Injuries are a major cause of morbidity and mortality to young children. The program is implemented during routine well-child visits, and serves primarily African American families. During their pediatric clinic visit, parents of children ages 6-20 months use a computer program to answer a series of assessment questions. The assessment questions take 10-15 minutes to complete, and the computer station is placed away from the main waiting area to provide privacy. Based on their responses, personalized injury prevention handout pages are printed immediately on a printer located in the computer station. The handout includes the name of the child along with a graph of the participant's risk score and suggestions to reduce risk. The handout also contains role-modeling scenarios tailored to the individual's beliefs about the effectiveness and difficulty of implementing the safety procedure.

Goal / Mission

The goal of Baby, Be Safe is to increase the use of child injury prevention measures.

Impact

Participants who received tailored educational materials reported greater adoption of home and car safety behaviors than those receiving generic information. This study offers promising findings to help prevent injuries to young children.

Results / Accomplishments

In a randomized controlled study, participants who received personally tailored information reported greater adoption of home and car safety behaviors at the 3-week follow-up than those receiving generic safety information (mean decrease in risk score of 4.68 vs. 1.54, p - 0.001). Within the tailored information group, those who discussed the information with their physician showed significantly greater change than those who did not (mean decrease in risk score of 10.00 vs. 2.98, p < 0.001). This difference was not observed in the group receiving generic safety information.

About this Promising Practice

Organization(s)
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Primary Contact
Tonja Nansel
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Division of Epidemiology, Statistics, and Prevention Research
6100 Executive Blvd, Room 7B05, MSC 7510
Bethesda, MD 20892
(301) 435-6937
nanselt@mail.nih.gov
http://nichd.nih.gov/about/org/despr/
Topics
Health / Prevention & Safety
Health / Children's Health
Organization(s)
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Source
Patient Education and Counseling
Date of publication
Mar 2002
Location
Washington D.C.
For more details
Target Audience
Children, Families
Michigan Health Improvement Alliance