Maintain pressure on reforms to protect NHSSurvey calls on health visitors to provide home hazard advice
Mothers need more information from health visitors on hazards in the home, suggests a survey launched to coincide with Child Safety Week 2009.
The NetMums survey, which involved 1,166 mothers of children under five, suggested mothers worried far more about their children being harmed on the roads than in the home, even though the majority of accidents resulting in paediatric admissions took place in the home.
While 79% of mothers thought they should be able to get information about accidents from health visitors, they were turning to their own relatives and friends with children for advice instead.
Fiona Smith, RCN adviser in children’s and young people’s nursing, said: ‘Nurses, midwives and health visitors all have an important role to play in helping to get messages out to local parents and families about accident prevention.
‘Child Safety Week offers a great platform for talking to parents about simple steps they can take to reduce the risks of accidents, especially within the home,’ she said.
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Readers' comments (1)
Sandra Robinson | 28-Jun-2009 9:38 am
As Health Visitors we provide safety information at a number of visits, we give out written information and back it up with with verbal information. We also advise on the subject of precautions such as safety gates etc. and on the subject of not using babywalkers as these are responsible for a number of accidents in the under 5's. Quite often our advise is ignored, we can only advise, not force parents to comply. Should caseholds be reduced and more health visitors trained we would be able to so much more.
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