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Community-based interventions for the prevention of burns and scalds in children
Insights
Community programs aiming to prevent childhood burns and scalds show limited evidence of success. More research is needed to evaluate effective, evidence-based interventions for global implementation.
Area of Science:
- Public Health
- Injury Prevention
- Pediatrics
Background:
- Burns and scalds are a major cause of child morbidity and mortality.
- Effective prevention strategies exist but community implementation data is scarce.
- Community-based, multi-strategy programs are hypothesized to reduce injury rates.
Purpose of the Study:
- To assess the effectiveness of community-based interventions for reducing burns and scalds in children aged 0-14 years.
- To evaluate coordinated, multi-strategy initiatives for pediatric burn and scald prevention.
Main Methods:
- Systematic review of community-based interventions.
- Searches included electronic databases, journal handsearches, and reference list snowballing.
- Inclusion criteria: controlled community interventions reporting changes in medically attended burn/scald injury rates in children (0-14 years).
Main Results:
- Only three of 32 identified studies met inclusion criteria.
- One study demonstrated a significant reduction in pediatric burn/scald injuries.
- Other studies' lack of positive results may stem from short intervention timeframes or inadequate implementation.
Conclusions:
- Limited research exists on the effectiveness of community-based programs for preventing childhood burns and scalds.
- There is a critical need for evaluating high-quality, evidence-based community interventions.
- Developing global guidelines for implementing effective burn/scald prevention programs is essential.
Background:
Burns and scalds are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in children. Successful counter-measures to prevent burn and scald-related injury have been identified. However, evidence indicating the successful roll-out of these counter-measures into the wider community is lacking. Community-based interventions in the form of multi-strategy, multi-focused programmes are hypothesised to result in a reduction in population-wide injury rates. This review tests this hypothesis with regards to burn and scald injury in children.
Objectives:
To assess the effectiveness of community-based interventions, defined as coordinated, multi-strategy initiatives, for reducing burns and scalds in children in children aged 0-14 years.
Search Strategy:
The search strategy was based on electronic searches, handsearches of selected journals and snowballing from reference lists of selected publications.
Selection Criteria:
Studies were independently screened for inclusion by two reviewers. Included studies were those that reported changes in medically attended burn and scald-related injury rates in a paediatric population (age 0 - 14 years), following the implementation of a controlled community-based intervention.
Data Collection And Analysis:
Data were independently extracted by two reviewers. Meta-analysis was not appropriate, due to the heterogeneity of the included studies.
Main Results:
Of 32 identified studies, only three met the criteria for inclusion. Only one of these three studies showed a significant decrease in paediatric burn and scald injury in the intervention community compared with the control community. The failure of the other two studies to show a positive result may have been due to limited time-frame for the intervention and/or failure to adequately implement the counter-measures in the communities.
Reviewers' Conclusions:
There are a very limited number of research studies allowing conclusions to be drawn about the effectiveness of community-based injury prevention programmes to prevent burns and scalds in children. There is a pressing need to evaluate high-quality community-based intervention programmes based on efficacious counter-measures to reduce burns and scalds in children. It is important that a framework for considering the problem of burns/scalds in children from a prevention perspective be articulated, and that an evidence-based suite of interventions be combined to create programme guidelines suitable for implementation in communities throughout the world.
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