Preventing accidents at home

The ‘Keeping Children Safe at Home’ research programme aimed to find the best advice about preventing accidents in young children at home, and to work with Children’s Centres to find suitable ways of passing on this advice to parents.

Why is this important?

Every year in the UK, over a quarter of a million children under the age or 5 have to go to hospital because of a fall, scald or swallowing something that may be harmful. Most of these accidents happen in the home or garden.

Not much is known about the best ways of stopping accidents at home, which is why we did this research programme.

Our programme addressed six research questions:

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Each question was investigated using one or more studies

Read about the individual studies

As a result of our studies we have produced an Injury Prevention Briefing. This is a resource for practitioners working with children and families about how to prevent injuries at home.

The Keeping Children Safe research programme

The research programme ran from 2009-2014. It was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (part of the NHS). We worked with the Child Action Prevention Trust and local parents to design the study. The programme was a collaboration between University and NHS researchers from Nottingham, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle and Leicester.

The Child Accident Prevention Trust and local Primary Care Research Networks, NHS Trusts and Children's Centres were also involved.

Our findings

Summaries of our findings are available for

The Final Project Report

Keeping Children Safe: a multicentre programme of research to increase the evidence base for preventing unintentional injuries in the home in the under-fives.

Resources for practitioners

We have produced an Injury Prevention Briefing (IPB) for practitioners working with children and families. This contains evidence-based injury prevention advice and activities for use with parents and has been endorsed by NICE (see E0079)

"This briefing supports some of the recommendations around strategies, activities, education and training for practitioners in the NICE guideline on preventing unintentional injuries and around prioritisation and home assessments in the NICE guideline on preventing unintentional injuries in the home." National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, April 2016

Resources for commissioners

We produced a Guide for Commissioners of child health services on preventing unintentional injuries among the under fives

A list of the publications from the Keeping Children Safe Project are available here

Who took part?

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More than 15,000 parents and more than 1000 general practitioners took part in our research. Thirty six children's centres tested an injury prevention briefing for us (see above)

Research Tools

Some copies of questionnaires used in this research are available for information only here. There are restrictions on using our questionnaires, so please contact us if you wish to use any of our questionnaires for research purposes.

For more information please contact:

Denise Kendrick
Professor of Primary Care Research
Division of Primary Care
School of Medicine
University of Nottingham
13th Floor, Tower Building
University Park
Nottingham NG7 2RD

t: 0115 8466914
e: Denise Kendrick

Enquiries

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To find out more about the Keeping Children Safe at Home programme contact: