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Abstract
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BACKGROUND: Childhood unintentional injuries are being perceived as a leading public health issue since they are one of the preventable causes of pediatric mortality and morbidity. Whether and how parental factors related to childhood injury are searched insufficiently. So, understanding what parents do to prevent injuries, how well these prevention strategies work, and what encourages these actions is essential to decrease unintentional injury risk and to develop effective injury prevention strategies. AIMS: This study was designed to investigate parents' attitudes about preventive measures of unintentional childhood injury, and the parental adherence to these measures. STUDY DESIGN: Cross sectional, descriptive study.
METHODS: The data were collected from the parents of children younger than ten years of age admitted to university hospital outpatient clinics for any reason and accepted to involve in the study. The first part of the questionnaire includes sociodemographic profiles of participating children. Serious injuries were considered as any injury that requires hospital admission. The second part of the questionnaire was prepared to evaluate parents' adherence to injury prevention rules. A total score calculation about the adherence of the parents to the injury prevention rules was worked out the addition of the scores of each answer given in each age group. Answers for every item given by the parents was scored as wrong (0), sometimes (1), correct (2). The score of each item was added and the result normalized to 100 points. Only complete questionnaires were taken for analysis.
RESULTS: 1126 children and parent pairs accepted to participate in the survey. It was found that 13.8% of participating children had experienced at least one serious injury. Although three-quarters of the parents had shown to have information about injury prevention, overall injury prevention scores found to be low. As children's age increased total injury prevention scores of parents was significantly decreased. Injury prevention scores were shown to be significantly increased with high education and maternal occupation. However, scores were shown to be decreased significantly with child age and family size.
CONCLUSION: Our study shows that parental adherence to the child safety measures to decrease unintentional injury risk of children is not satisfactory in Turkey. Especially parents of 5-9 years old children, big families (more than 5 people), parents with less than 8 years of education, and non-working mothers should be the main target groups for intervention strategies according to our study results.
Language: en |