Effectiveness of Interventions in the Prevention of Home Injuries among Children Under 5 Years of Age: A Systematic Review

Injuries caused by home injuries in children under 5 years of age is one of the main causes of death in this group and also constitutes a significant public health burden. This review aimed at summarizing the literature on the effectiveness of interventions to prevent home injuries in children under 5 years of age.

Magiran, Iran Medex, and SID in Persian Scientific databases and BioMed Central, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, and Scopus were systematically searched for articles published up to June 2016. Then, two researchers reviewed the papers independently and finally, 14 studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria.

The results showed the effectiveness of intervention measures including training sessions at home, home visit, group discussions, and interviews as the educational tools. The educational approach was used as the intervention in 11 studies; legislative/incentive approach and engineering/technology approaches had not been used in papers; and three studies had used the educational intervention and engineering/technological approaches.

Most of the effective inventions included studies that used the combination of effective methods to reduce the risk of injuries. Since the accidents are preventable, the appropriate intervention strategies, especially active intervention or a combination of interventional measures are effective to reduce the risk of home accidents and injuries in children.