Creating a certification program in child passenger safety : meeting a longstanding need.

In this poster it is stated that 85.5% of California child occupant fatalities occurred in survivable crashes, based on nine years of California data. Overcoming safety seat/vehicle incompatibility requires substantial aid, often unavailable through safety seat access programmes. Risk assessment gaps caused poor parental decisions. Overall, too few have access to skilled trained child passenger safety specialists. With grant support from the California Office of Traffic Safety, SafetyBeltSafe USA (SBS USA) set out to pilot unique child passenger safety education for professionals and community volunteers, beginning in October 1994. The programme goals were: (1) to recruit, train and mentor up to 50 community-based advocates for child passenger safety to serve the 58 California counties; and (2) to increase correct, consistent use of child restraints by providing local resources capable of addressing misuse, nonuse and sporadic use issues which tend to be more related to motivational factors than lack of correct information. Extensive resource/training and evaluation materials were developed by SBS USA for use in a three-day session. It appears that increased interest statewide in more extensive training has become evident, even among those not planning to seek certification as a specialist for a specific locality. (A)