The warmer months see whānau hitting the roads more often to escape to the stunning beaches, bush and lakes of Aotearoa for some adventure.
That of course means more tamariki travelling in car seats, which are often not fitted correctly. In fact, at a recent car seat clinic run by Plunket’s Injury Prevention team in tandem with the local Police, every single car seat they checked had not been placed properly for safe travel.
Considering New Zealand’s reliance on their cars instead of public transport to get from A to B on a daily basis, car seat safety is a huge focus for our Injury Prevention Team. And generally speaking, according to National Injury Prevention Manager, Kathryn Impelmans, “preventable child injury is the second leading cause of tamariki death every single year.”
Kathryn has worked with Plunket in a variety of different roles for 32 years, originally as a nurse, then moving into car seat rentals, which was the initial spark of her interest in childhood injury prevention. Over more recent years, Kathryn has been Plunket’s subject matter expert on preventable child injury across the whole organisation.
We now have an established group of specialist injury prevention and child safety kaimahi who offer services beyond car seat clinics. These include home visits, inclinic and virtual appointments, group education and collaborative community-based programmes to help keep tamariki safe. This year, the small but mighty team were able to see more than 1,400 individual whānau, provide over 600 child restraints, checked installation and use of more than 440 child restraints at roadside checkpoints and clinics, and reached around 3,000 families at education groups.
With the statistic about preventable childhood injury being a leading cause of child death in Aotearoa, Kathryn says, “it’s been important to make injury prevention important again.”
