WORCESTER MEDICINE
A.I. In Medicine
The Quest for Childhood Injury Prevention- Embodied in Safety Quest Michael Hirsch, MD
The Safety Quest mobile classroom vehicle.
W
hen I joined the Injury Prevention Program at UMass Memorial Children’s Medical Center in 2000 as the Pediatric Trauma Medical Director, I found 650 pediatric trauma patients were being admitted each year. Fully 90 percent of these injuries were preventable, as I learned from my mentor, Dr. Barbara Barlow, founder of the Injury Free Coalition for Kids.
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…we established the Greater Worcester Gun Buy Back Program…that has taken over 4,000 guns off the streets… To make a dent in childhood injury prevention in Central MA, which was incidentally the #1 killer of children under the age of 19, we tried many avenues. Bike rodeos where we did helmet fittings. Car seat safety checkpoints to ensure that car seats were used and used properly (50 percent are not). Home safety kits with room-by-room information on eliminating household hazards. Promoting the use of ski helmets at our local
ski venues. Working with the Juvenile Court system to create a program for 1st time Driving Offenders to have them spend a day in the Trauma Center to help them better understand the consequences of their reckless choices (TEEN RIDE-Reality Informed Drivers Education). This reduced the recidivism of these driving offenders from 35 percent to 7 percent. And of course, we established the Greater Worcester Gun Buy Back Program, Goods for Guns, that has taken over 4,000 guns off the streets of Worcester and 25 collaborative communities. Central Massachusetts boasts the lowest penetrating trauma rate of any county in the Commonwealth. Our flagship program was rolled out in 2008-Mobile Safety Street (MSS). It visited thousands of students in the Worcester Public Schools and other Central MA elementary schools. We had a brilliant Injury Prevention Educator, Allison Rook Burr, who worked with the school systems to integrate the MSS program into the health curriculum of the schools, so it was not an extra burden on the school systems. It demonstrated 40 indoor and 40 outdoor safety behaviors using a hands-on experience. We published papers verifying that students who participated in the MSS program had a 50 percent better understanding of the injury prevention information and better retained that information at 6 months post experience by a factor of 25 percent. Unfortunately, the vehicle in storage during the winter of 2017 was severely damaged and the necessary funding to refurbish it could not be found. We wanted to revive it, but the situation looked dire. With all the Injury Prevention efforts that we had made, surely complemented by the Massachusetts Legislators that helped pass great ordinances on helmets, ATV, Texting and Driving, improved junior operator licensing regulations, drunk driving, all helped us realize a reduction of trauma admissions to 200+/year. Injury Prevention was winning. But MSS was dead in the water. The lifesaver came when the Office of Philanthropy at UMass Memorial Health learned that the Fundación MAPFRE had read about the MSS program and wanted to explore a partnership to restart it. But times had changed and Fundación MAPFRE had great experience in their home
Winter 2023
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