Investigating the Effectiveness of Safety Interventions to Reduce Traffic Accidents in Pregnant Women: A Systematic Review

Traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of death in pregnant women. One of the investment areas for maternal and neonatal health is targeted interventions to increase maternal safety to prevent traffic accidents. Therefore, this study was conducted with the aim of identifying and categorizing different types of safety interventions to reduce traffic accidents in pregnant women.

The study was a systematic review. Interventional articles from Persian databases including Magiran, Iran Medex, and SID, and English scientific information databases including PubMed, Cochrane, Sciencedirect, Embase, Science of Web, and Scopus were searched. All identified articles were collected by one person using Endnote software. Then, the full text of the articles was reviewed by two researchers and the articles that met the entry criteria were identified. Other articles were added to the previous collection of articles using forward citation and backward citation reviews. The EPHPP tool was used to assess the quality of the studies.

The initial search resulted in finding 5329 article abstracts. Eventually, two interventional studies were identified for evaluation in this study. The intervention approach used in one study was educational/behavioral and in the other was engineering/technology. Both studies reported that they had made significant changes in the desired outcomes, which was fastening the seat belt in pregnant women. One study was of poor quality in quality assessment and the other was of medium quality.

Safety interventions to reduce traffic accidents in pregnant women have been very little worked on worldwide. It seems that there is still much room for studies in the field of safety interventions to reduce traffic accidents among pregnant women.