Principles in injury control: lessons to be learned from child safety seats

The effort to increase the use of child safety seats (CSS) over the last decade has been an outstanding success in the field of childhood injury control. This article describes that effort and discusses lessons which can be learned and applied to other injury control problems. These include choosing a specific important problem and addressing it with a particular solution, developing a critical mass of community awareness through broad-based grass roots support, legislation, efforts of primary care physicians, and eventual institutionalization of the program.