An Experience in Home Injury Prevention

Abstract

I, in Richland County, Ohio, known as the home safety notebook project, sought to motivate families to keep a record of injuries in the home. It appears to have, demonstrated that such families soon establish safety patterns that perceptibly reduce the rate of injuries.The project was undertaken by the health committee of the Mansfield Parent-Teacher Association Council in cooperation with the home safety program of the Mansfield-Richland County Health Department. Two major purposes were (a) to test acceptability to homemakers of the methods used and (b) to measure change in frequency of injuries during a 16-week period. In addition, data on type of injury, location and activity of persons at the time of injury, parts of the body injured,, and other injury characteristics were to be obtained.The Mansfield-Richland County Health Department is 1 of 3 local health departments in the Nation carrying on a 5-year home safety program through a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. The home safety notebook project is one of many projects developed Dr. Wain, who has been in local public health work in Ohio since 1939, is health commissioner of the Mansfield-Richland County Health Department in that State: Mr. Samuelson is director of the health department's community home safety program. Dr. Hemphill is associate professor of public health sta-

Book Review: Injury and Violence Prevention: Behavioral Science Theories, Methods, and Applications

“…1 By the 1950s, human-factor whims of causes and their prevention predominated from various Kellogg Foundation-funded demonstration programs to state and local health departments. [2][3][4][5][6] From the 1960s, when I started in injury control, into the mid-70s, Public Health Service's nexus of environment-human factors prism was still on nonreproducible humanfactors causes and prevention. [7][8] But that national thrust slowly dissolved to a more balanced injurycontrol effort under William Haddon, Jr., the father of modern injury-control epidemiology and the first director of the present National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who forced the automobile industry forward on safety designs and regulations.…”