P3A289: Injury Prevention on the Go: Evaluation of Mobile Injury Prevention Education Program

Background: Injury remained the leading cause of child mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic with over 4.1 million child injuries reported in 2020, however, fatality rates from child injury increased, accounting for 8,567 deaths (He et al., 2022, CDC 2021). Both home injuries and motor vehicle crashes contribute significantly to these estimates. Others have presented evidence demonstrating reduction in home safety threats after community-based injury prevention education interventions using mobile safety centers (Furman et al., 2020). On the road, car seats significantly reduce a child’s risk for injury in a crash (Durbin et al., 2018). Given the change in the child injury landscape during the pandemic, this study aims to evaluate the baseline efficacy of ongoing educational programs provided by a mobile safety center in a diverse, urban community to contrast to intervention outcomes in the post COVID-19 era. The center provides caregivers hands-on, language appropriate, home and child passenger safety training using a simulated home environment. Participants complete surveys immediately prior to and after the educational intervention to assess success. This study describes the results of pre/post surveys over an 18-month period in 2018 and 2019.

Methods: Surveys contained 13 and 12 items for home and passenger safety respectively. Pre and post program tests were paired, deidentified, and input into an electronic dataset. Data was analyzed for average participant improvement from pre to post intervention. Item analysis was conducted to identify the most improved survey questions.

Results: Responses from 424 participants in the home safety program and 583 participants in the passenger safety program were reviewed. Regarding attitudes on child injury, 87% of participants agreed in pre-surveys that “injuries are preventable”. The mean pretest score for home safety was 52.1% (range 0-85.7%). Posttest score mean was 85.2% (range 50-100%), with an overall increase of 33.1%. The mean score on passenger safety pretest was 52.4% (range 8.3-91%) and 91.7% posttest (range 33-100%), with an average overall increase of 39.3%. Items with greatest improvement included poison control contact information (76.7% improvement) and recommendations against use of baby walkers (57.5% improvement) in the home safety program. Items related to proper harness clip positioning (68.3 % improvement) and proper time to switch from rear-facing to forward-facing car seats (55.2% improvement) showed the greatest improvement in the passenger safety program.

Conclusion: The results of this study demonstrate this community-based prevention education initiative found an invested audience and significantly improved awareness of childhood injury prevention strategies indicating strong potential for improvement of childhood morbidity and mortality in a diverse, urban community prior to COVID-19. This program is ongoing, and continued program efficacy analysis will include comparison of a paired 18-month dataset after the pandemic as well as by language of instruction.