Injury Prevention

An Interactive, Hospital-based Injury Prevention Program for First-, Second-, and Third-grade Students

Working on the problem

We set out to find an appropriate educational program for children to help combat the problem of pediatric head and spinal cord injuries. We found a comprehensive, evidence-based injury prevention program developed by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, and the ThinkFirst National Injury Prevention Foundation: ThinkFirst for Kids.³

The Program

The ThinkFirst for Kids program is a 6-week comprehensive brain and spinal cord injury prevention program. The first lesson introduces the video Street Smart, A ThinkFirst Adventure. This video teaches children how to have fun and protect themselves from injury at the same time. An informative lesson on brain and spinal cord injury is presented to the class following the video. During the next 5 weeks, the students concentrate on 1 of the 5 areas of injury prevention. Each 30-minute lesson is

Implementation of the Program

When we began the ThinkFirst for Kids Program, we needed to address various issues: obtaining a sponsoring physician, funding, and recruiting volunteer presenters for the program. The sponsoring physician was responsible for areas such as garnering support for the program from the medical center, other local physicians, health professionals, and the community; talking to the media; fund-raising; and coordinating with the national ThinkFirst office.⁴ Our sponsoring physician was a pediatrician

Program history

In the spring of 2001, the Child and Adolescent Health and Wellness Council implemented the ThinkFirst for Kids program beginning with one pilot elementary school. We found that the program was easy to present, and the students enjoyed it; they wrote us thank-you notes and gave us hugs as we left on our last day. The following school year, the Council offered to present this program to any of the 28 public and private schools in Cambria County; the program was presented in 10 of the 28 schools

Results

Overall, for the 3 years of data collected, 6973 children completed the pretest and 6644 children completed the post-test. We used the evaluation tool that had been developed by the National ThinkFirst Office.

Discussion

The self-reporting surveys may or may not depict actual behavior. Also, the surveys for each grade level were distinctly different and contained different knowledge and behavioral questions. During the 2004-2005 school year, we rewrote the questionnaire so that each student would receive the same age-appropriate questionnaire in all grade levels.

Preliminary data from our level I trauma center (Figure 7) revealed that our pediatric head and neck injuries have decreased. Specifically, 64

Comments

The ThinkFirst program is easy for a variety of personnel to present, and we have found that it has a positive impact on the young student population. It could work well in conjunction with other programs from ENA's Injury Prevention Institute, ENCARE. For more information about injury prevention programs, visit the following Web sites: www.thinkfirst.org and www.ena.org.