against safety improvements, especially where educational or informative measures are required. Safety education has to be phased, developmental and regular.
Attention must also be given to public health education in road safety. Unbiased and unequivocal information is needed if individuals are to be empowered to make life-changes.
Transport systems must also be based on collective rather than individual provision, thus placing less emphasis upon dangerous modes of transport, such as cars, and promoting safer modes such as public transport.
Safety education
One way to put accident prevention at the heart of the public health agenda would be to make discrete personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE) lessons a mandatory part of the school curriculum.
Approaches to health and safety in schools are about involving the whole community. If we are going to successfully tackle health inequalities and issues, we need to hear the different
Sep/Oct 10
perceptions and experiences that children have. It is also essential to establish better links with parents of children in early years learning.
Home and leisure safety
Funding is a major issue in all areas of safety. A fundamental problem is the inability to link the budget bearing expenditure of prevention to the financial benefits of reduced accidents.
Even so, home and leisure safety needs to be a core responsibility for every local authority and health authority.
All the evidence suggests that there is a need for greater emphasis on home safety - which accounts for about 40 per cent of all accidents treated in hospital or by a GP. Home accidents account for about 2.7million visits to accident and emergency departments every year. Almost a million children under 15 seek hospital attention following a home accident and about 1,700 people aged 65 or over die following a fall every year.
Local authority support should include helping to provide appropriate housing for families
The delivery of home safety in local authorities has historically been patchy, poorly funded and lacking in influence. Many councils do not carry out any health promotion activities.
Those that do have very small budgets and are continually under threat of further cuts as accident prevention is not a statutory function and is sometimes seen as a soft target.
Accident prevention works best when the people involved are drawn from a number of different fields including voluntary bodies, charities, local authorities and government departments.
Local businesses (who bear some of the cost of lost time due to employees suffering the effects of an accident at home) should be encouraged to participate in the joint funding of projects. Local authorities also need a clear duty to become involved with accident prevention work. This may be via a statutory requirement or
and vulnerable people, while acknowledging that there is a significant correlation between high accident rates and poverty, mental health and environmental quality.
through some other mechanism.
Where local authorities support either an officer or a home safety committee there are numerous examples of effective and innovative schemes involving direct provision, self help or moral support.
To improve the capacity of local organisations training needs to be made available to anyone who is likely to visit homes where direct advice can be given. Any training should include teachers, carers and health professionals.
Courses need to be developed which are delivered locally and cheaply but based upon a national agreed contract.
A new national data set is also needed which would record type of accident, age, location, ethnicity, geographical and socio- economic information, as well as severity of injury. It should be collected by all accident and emergency departments in a standardised way.
The concern in 2010 is that accident promotion, and to some extent health promotion, will now rely too heavily on individual lifestyle choices.
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