2010/2011 Safekids Campaign Burns Partnership Project

http://www.safekids.org.nz/index.php/page/campaigns

Safekids New Zealand is a national child injury prevention service established in the 1990’s by Starship Children’s Health to help reduce the high rate of unintentional injury to children. Every July they launch a national child-safety campaign that focuses on the prevention of two specific unintentional childhood injuries. The last time they focussed on child burn prevention was in 2008. Their campaign had already started when Nathalie came on board as education officer but she collaborated with Safekids’ Anthony Rola on various magazine and newspaper articles about burn prevention that year.  This was the start of Burn Support Group’s working relationship with Safekids which has continued to be fostered by both agencies even though Safekids haven’t focussed on burn prevention as one of their focus campaign issues since 2008.

Safekids Campaign Coordinator Sharlaine Chee approached Nathalie with the idea of creating a partnership group of injury prevention agencies to collaborate on Safekids 2010/11 campaign towards the end of 2009. Burn Support Group was very interested in being a part of any group of professional injury prevention agencies working in partnership and sharing their resources and ideas to help prevent childhood burn injuries.  To cut a long story short, BSG has been an active member of a pilot group of agencies working together in a burns partnership project this year along with Safekids New Zealand, Safe Waitakere Injury Prevention, National Burns Centre and New Zealand Fire Service.

The objective of the group was to modify and redevelop a burns education kit originally developed by Safe Waitakere Injury Prevention. The group combined their expertise in burn prevention, sought for a consistency of messages and produced 10,000; ‘Loving Our Children: Safer Homes: Burns Prevention Toolkits.’ This is an A5 spiral bound flip chart which has general facts about child burns and safety messages around common causes of burns and has colour coded tabulated segments that align with the Well Child developmental and behavioural framework used by early childhood health professionals. It was distributed to 21 injury prevention coalitions and included in the resource kits presented in the Safekids Injury Prevention workshops nationwide. It is also downloadable as a printable PDF file on the Safekids website and will soon be available on ours.

Burn Support Group provided substantial funding towards this Burns Partnership Project. It was a very successful pilot partnership that will hopefully create a foundation for establishing and ensuring the consistency of burn prevention and burn first aid messages and the sharing of up to date information across lead burn prevention agencies nationwide.