[Effective interventions to prevent child injuries: a review of the literature]

Child injuries represent an important public health problem. The aim of this paper is to review the current scientific knowledge on interventions designed to prevent child injuries. The current state of knowledge in this area was assessed by means of a specific method involving a review of literature reviews and a classification of health promotion interventions identified in these reviews (rapid reviews). We found a large number of effective or promising programmes devoted to the prevention of the most common child injuries: drowning, burns, falls, poisoning, electrocution, sports and leisure injuries. Some interventions are based on environmental measures, while others are educational or use law and regulatory processes. Some are primary prevention measures, others are secondary prevention measures, while others are multidimensional and can effectively reduce several types of injuries. For example, home safety education and provision of safety equipment, or home-based parenting interventions, can have an impact on injury rates. These findings present a number of limitations due to the marked diversity of the quality of the documents reviewed. It should also be stressed that interventions that are not listed in this article are not necessarily ineffective: they may simply lack a rigorous evaluation enabling them to be identified in our review.