A Study on the Occurrences and Preventive Strategies of Accident in Children

초등학생의 안전사고 실태 및 예방전략에 관한 조사 연구

Accidents are important causes of death and disability in children. They also have enormous financial implications. Young children become an victim of accidents easily because of their physical fragileness and their coping behavior being vulnerable to any actions taken by accidents. Once they have a accident, the children whose not fully developed, suffer from devastating long-term after-effects. Lee, Lee, Kang and Han(1995) reported that ninety percent of accidents can be prevented. But there is no national system to manage, evaluate and analyse the information about child accidents, even though it is necessary for accident prevention policies and health promotion of the general public. The purpose of the study was to determine how often children have accidents and define the accident prevention strategies in children. The investigator conducted a descriptive study by performing the surveys, interviews, and workshops for the 2,458 young children, 10 teachers, and 1,494 parents. The data collection for the study began on September 2000 and completed on April 20, 2001. The analysis of the data was done with Window SPSS 10.0 for descriptive statistics. Among those children, 1,298 children(52.8％) injured from accidents. The children who had accident answered that they injured from traffic accident(27.3％), inside the home(26.3％), on the playground(17.0％), during playtime(13.6％), in the school(5.9％) and food poisoning(7.1％). To define accident prevention strategies for the school children, the parents and the teachers who had a special interest in this topic formed a special task force under the guidance of the investigator. The team was charged to prepare the basis of content materials by identifying the problems, setting standards for the program, prioritizing the process, and selecting the methods of implementation and evaluation. Eight issues and concerns identified by the team were: 1)allowing young children to learn undesirable habits and behaviors that would bother others without knowing; 2) not guarding young children from car accident; 3)unattended accident at playground; 4) considering home places safe; 5)unattended accident at school. These issues were found to be coinciding with the actual child accident cases occurred recent years in Korea. Greater efforts are required to reduce unnecessary deaths and disability from childhood accidents. This study gave a very useful and important data to prepare accident prevention educational program and to prepare accident prevention strategies.