A Brief Educational Intervention to Improve Healthcare Providers' Awareness of Child Passenger Safety

Introduction. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among US children aged 4–14 years. In theory, health provider counseling about Child Passenger Safety (CPS) could be a useful deterrent. The data about the effectiveness of CPS dissemination is sparse, but existing results suggest that providers are not well informed. Moreover, there is insufficient evidence to determine whether provider counseling about CPS is effective. Methods. We therefore assessed CPS best practice knowledge among 217 healthcare workers at hospitals in seven cities throughout the USA and evaluated the impact of a brief, lunch and learn educational intervention with a five-item questionnaire. Attendees were comprised of physicians, nurses, social workers, pediatric residents, and pediatric trauma response teams. Results. Pre-post survey completion was nearly 100% (216 of 217 attendees). Participation was fairly evenly distributed according to age (18–29, 30–44, and 45+ years). More than 80% of attendees were women. Before intervention, only 4% of respondents (9/216) answered all five questions correctly; this rose to 77% (167/216) ( , using a Wilcoxon signed-rank test) after intervention. Conclusion. Future research should consider implementation and controlled testing of comparable educational programs to determine if they improve dissemination of CPS best practice recommendations in the long term. 1. Introduction Unintentional injuries due to motor vehicle crashes (MVCs) are the leading cause of death and long-term disability between the ages of 4–14 years [1, 2]. When properly installed, child safety seats have been shown to reduce the risk of childhood injury by 71% to 82% and death by 28% relative to seat belts alone [3–6]. Within the subset of four- to eight-year olds, booster seats reduced the risk of nonfatal injury by 45% relative to seat belts alone [7]. Nonetheless, about 50% of the 1,500 US children who die in MVCs each year are unrestrained [8]. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and many others promote the importance of child restraint in vehicles [9, 10]. Moreover, for more than a decade, the AAP has published best practice clinical algorithms as an aid to promoting restraint use by health care providers. The failure of such approaches to effectively translate research knowledge into practice is reflected in the US Preventive Services Task Force finding of insufficient evidence to support an incremental benefit from provider counseling about motor vehicle occupant restraint