Impact of the national home safety equipment scheme 'Safe At Home' on hospital admissions for unintentional injury in children under 5: a controlled interrupted time series analysis.

BACKGROUND

Unintentional home injuries are a leading cause of preventable death in young children. Safety education and equipment provision improve home safety practices, but their impact on injuries is less clear. Between 2009 and 2011, a national home safety equipment scheme was implemented in England (Safe At Home), targeting high-injury-rate areas and socioeconomically disadvantaged families with children under 5. This provided a 'natural experiment' for evaluating the scheme's impact on hospital admissions for unintentional injuries.

METHODS

Controlled interrupted time series analysis of unintentional injury hospital admission rates in small areas (Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs)) in England where the scheme was implemented (intervention areas, n=9466) and matched with LSOAs in England and Wales where it was not implemented (control areas, n=9466), with subgroup analyses by density of equipment provision.

RESULTS

57 656 homes receiving safety equipment were included in the analysis. In the 2 years after the scheme ended, monthly admission rates declined in intervention areas (-0.33% (-0.47% to -0.18%)) but did not decline in control areas (0.04% (-0.11%-0.19%), p value for difference in trend=0.001). Greater reductions in admission rates were seen as equipment provision density increased. Effects were not maintained beyond 2 years after the scheme ended.

CONCLUSIONS

A national home safety equipment scheme was associated with a reduction in injury-related hospital admissions in children under 5 in the 2 years after the scheme ended. Providing a higher number of items of safety equipment appears to be more effective in reducing injury rates than providing fewer items.

Informations de copyright

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Competing interests: Authors MCW, CC and DK previously evaluated the Safe At Home scheme in a study funded by RoSPA and published in 2011: https://www.rospa.com/rospaweb/docs/advice-services/home-safety/final-evaluation-report-safe-at-home.pdf. RoSPA received funding from the UK government to manage and implement the Safe At Home scheme. They provided an advisory role in this study and did not directly analyse the data.