very day, across the country, 39,000 children end up in hospital emergency rooms or doctors’ offices with broken bones, lacerations, burns and other serious injuries.

As a parent, you constantly seek to keep your child injury free and healthy. The National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions (NACHRI) wants to help you, along with your local children’s hospital. NACHRI is working to prevent such high rates of injury and death to children. Early this year, NACHRI received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to train member hospitals in an innovative injury prevention model.

Called the Injury Free Coalition for Kids Injury Prevention model, it was developed at Harlem Hospital by Dr. Barbara Barlow, a pediatric trauma surgeon. The model is based on data-driven, community-based injury prevention to help reduce trauma admissions and serious injuries.

The program has already been replicated at eight hospitals including Children’s Medical Center of Dallas. The results have been dramatic. At Harlem Hospital alone, serious injuries and trauma have been reduced by 50 percent.

NACHRI will host a training conference early in 2002 for those who are interested in establishing this model program in their hospital. Children’s hospitals also offer a number of other injury prevention programs to reduce your child’s chance of injury.

The cost to families when a child is seriously injured is immeasurable. And the reality is, most of these injuries are preventable. What can you do? Find out what programs and information your children’s hospital offers to keep your child safe and injury free.