Child Safety Week 2022 – Let’s keep ‘safety in mind’ and help raise awareness of childhood unintentional injuries in East Sussex

Date: Tuesday, 07th Jun 2022 | Category: General

East Sussex Public Health and partners are working together to reduce and prevent childhood unintentional injuries.

In East Sussex, the rate of hospital admissions due to unintentional and deliberate injuries in children 0-4 years continues to remain significantly higher than the England average, with Hastings and Rother having some of the highest admission rates in the South-East. During 2021, on average ten children under 5 attended an East Sussex A&E every month due to a burn or scald.

Often, we think of ‘accidents’ as events that are unintended, or things that just happen and therefore there is nothing we can do about them. However, the reality is that accidents are predictable events and are frequently preventable! They are predictable because we know who is most likely to have an accident, and why, where and when accidents are most likely to happen.

We are inviting anyone who works with children and families to help highlight this important issue by promoting Child Safety Week, which runs from Monday 6 June to Sunday 12 June 2022. This year’s theme is ‘Safety in mind’ – highlighting how many accidents can be prevented with the right knowledge. Understanding what the risks are at each stage of a child’s development and knowing what simple changes to make can enable parents and carers to feel confident in keeping their children safe from serious accidents.

There is a wealth of ideas and downloadable resources to support the campaign on the Child Safety Week webpages; resources include:

Poster
Factsheets – Bite-sized facts and safety tips on the main accident risks to children; these include choking, strangulation and suffocation, fire safety, falls, accidental poisoning, burns, road safety, water safety and button batteries. Easy to read, use and share. Suitable for printing off, emailing, or posting on social media.
Translated Factsheets – Five fact sheets translated into five languages – Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Polish and Arabic, along with a small number of factsheets available in additional languages
Session Plans – Prompt cards illustrating eight common safety scenarios, complemented by short workshop outlines with questions to stimulate discussion and safety facts and tips to share.
Road Safety Hub – A hub of resources to help keep children safe on our roads, including a guide to child car seats and teaching children about pedestrian safety.

How can your organisation/service support Child Safety Week?

There are many ways your organisation/service can help raise awareness of childhood unintentional injuries amongst the children and families with whom you work, for example:

Connect with CAPT on Facebook and Instagram and share their new safety animations and illustrations launching on Monday 6th June
Promote Child Safety Week as part of your organisation/service newsletters or include relevant content on your website
Look through the session plans with your colleagues and consider how you might be able to promote safety messages through your existing organisation/service activities (these do not need to have a specific accident prevention focus!
Download the Child Safety Week poster to help create an engaging display
Check out CAPT’s downloadable storybook Staying Safe with Sam supporting services and families to help young children learn how to stay safe around cleaning and laundry products
Share key safety messages with children and families using our locally produced Keeping Children Safe- Social Media Toolkit. The toolkit provides ready-made social media posts and newsletter text across a range of unintentional injury themes that can be used as a conversation starter with families and an engaging way to share information about the simple steps everyone can take to help prevent childhood accidents.

Please share this information with your colleagues/networks. Working together, we can build confidence and resilience, and help keep children we care about safe from serious harm.