Injury control and safety promotion
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Domestic appliances are burning people. In the European Union, accidents requiring hospital treatment due to burns from hot objects account for between 0 and 1% of all such accidents. Young children are particularly at risk. These reported accidents requiring hospital treatment are also likely to be a small proportion of the total number of burns from hot objects. ⋯ For products with the same function, some types of design or materials of construction are safer, with lower surface temperatures. Many product standards have no or unnecessarily high limits on surface temperatures. Many standards do not address the realities of who is using their products, for what purpose or where they are located. Some standards use unreasonable general limitations and exclusions that allow products with higher surface temperatures than they should have. Many standards rely on the experience factor for avoiding injury that is no longer valid, with the increased availability of safer products of the same type. A major field of work ahead is to carry out more surveys and in-depth studies of non-fatal accidents and injuries.
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Inj Control Saf Promot · Sep 2002
A unified framework for injury control: the public health approach and Haddon's Matrix combined.
Injury specialists have not successfully convinced policy makers and the public that injuries can be controlled. That failure may be due in part to the lack of a unified understanding of injury control. The two most important models utilized in injury control are Haddon's Matrix and the Public Health Approach (PHA). ⋯ Diagrams of the model are presented to help teach the concepts of injury described in this unitary model. In conclusion, we can say that the inclusion of three injury concepts in one framework provides a rigorous and coherent construct for the understanding of injury and implementation of control activities. It can therefore be used to design more comprehensive programs for injury control and promote policies and funding commensurate with the magnitude of the injury problem.