Background:

Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of child morbidity and mortality, Emergency Services can be a good place to influence their prevention, guiding and anticipating risk situations. The objective of this work was to determine the knowledge and attitude of parents-caregivers of children from one to four years old about child safety. We evaluate if there are differences according the consultation was for unintentional injury or not.

Methods:

Study of cross-sectional surveys performed in an Emergency Health Service during 44 days randomly chosen between two periods (10 / 2015 - 01 / 2016 and 10 / 2016 - 01 / 2017). The parents-caregivers of children between one and four years old were surveyed. For each child with unintentional injury (GROUP1) two other children were included with another reason of consultation (GROUP2). The Framingham Security Survey was used. It was considered that the knowledge and attitude of the parents-caregivers was adequate if the proportion of correct answers was ≥75%. The data was analyzed with the statistical program SPSS v 22.0 for Windows.

Results:

499 parents-caregivers responded to the survey; 170 belonged to GROUP1 and 329 belonged to GROUP2. The median of correct answers was 27/39 (69.2%) in both groups. The variables where more incorrect answers were detected were: lack of security in front of a fire (409, 82%) and absence of window bars (402, 80.6%). Forty-five (26.5%) parents-caregivers of GROUP1 and 94 (28.6%) of GROUP2 answered correctly≥75% of the questions (p = 0.620); According to the age of children, 34.8% of parents-caregivers of children aged one year, 26.9% of the one aged two years, 26.8% of the ones aged three years and 17.9% of the ones aged four years (p = 0.007) answered correctly the questions.

Conclusions:

The knowledge of families to prevent unintentional injuries was low, whether or not it was the reason for consultation. A relaxation in the security measures was detected when increasing the autonomy of the children.

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