Parents' Attitudes and Adherence to Unintentional Injury Prevention Measures in Ankara, Turkey

Abstract

Background: Childhood unintentional injuries areperceived as a leading public health issue since they areone of the preventable causes of paediatric mortality andmorbidity. Whether and how parental factors are relatedto childhood injury has been researched insufficiently.Aims: To investigate parents' attitudes to preventivemeasures of unintentional childhood injury, and theparental adherence to these measures.Study Design: Cross-sectional, descriptive study.Methods: The data were collected from the parentsof children younger than ten years of age admitted touniversity hospital outpatient clinics for any reason andwho agreed to be involved in the study. The first part ofthe questionnaire included sociodemographic profiles ofparticipating children. Serious injuries were consideredto be any injury that requires hospital admission. Thesecond part of the questionnaire was prepared to evaluateparents' adherence to injury prevention rules. A totalscore calculation about the adherence of the parents tothe injury prevention rules was worked out the additionof the scores of each answer given in each age group.Answers for each item given by the parents were scoredas wrong (0), sometimes (1) or correct (2). The scorefor each item was added and the result normalized to100 points. Only complete questionnaires were used foranalysis.Results: A total of 1126 children and parent pairs agreedto participate in the survey. It was found that 13.8% ofthe participating children had experienced at least oneserious injury. Although three-quarters of the parentshad received information about injury prevention, theoverall injury prevention scores were found to be low.As children's age increased, the total injury preventionscores of parents decreased significantly. Injuryprevention scores were shown to increase significantlywith high education and maternal occupation. However,scores were shown to decrease significantly withincreased child age and family size.Conclusion: Our study shows that parental adherenceto the child safety measures aimed at decreasing theunintentional injury risk of children is not satisfactoryin Turkey. In particular, parents of 5-9-year-old children,big families (more than five people), parents with lessthan 8 years of education and non-working mothersshould be the main target groups for interventionstrategies according to our study result.