hide abstract details

Jamie Holland, MD
Andrew Hashikawa, MD
Ashley Baggett, CHES
Wendi Wendt, MD

Unintentional injury is a leading cause of death in children, particularly in high-risk communities with substantial health disparities. Pop-Up Safety Town (PST) is a pediatric injury prevention program created to address the limitations of a “traditional” Safety Town to meet the injury education needs of the children and families who otherwise are unlikely to have access to this education and/or resources. Last year this program was adapted and implemented at the United Community Center, a local school/community center that serves primarily Hispanic children and families. This year we expanded PST to an additional site: the Midtown Clinic associated with our tertiary children’s hospital which serves primarily Black children and families. Feedback was obtained in the form of surveys to help improve future PST events.

Each event was tailored to the community’s individual needs. Topics that were identified as areas of need by both communities included 1) animal safety, 2) bike safety, 3) burn safety, 4) car seat safety, 5) fire safety, 6) pedestrian safety, 7) water safety, and 8) medication safety. The Midtown Clinic event also included 1) firearm safety, 2) lead testing, 3) Planned Parenthood, and 4) behavioral health resources. Feedback was obtained from school/community center staff, event volunteers, and caregivers of children impacted by PST. Survey questions addressed types of injuries experienced by their child/student, topics to be covered in future events, and how our injury prevention work can be sustained in their community.

We provided essential injury prevention education to approximately 350 K4 and K5 students over four half-day PST sessions at the United Community Center. Additionally, we reached approximately 40 children, as well as their caregivers, at our Midtown Clinic event. Every child was fitted with an adjustable bike helmet to take with them for use at home. A drawstring backpack filled with injury prevention resources was provided to each child to share with their caregivers. At the Midtown Clinic event, 15 children underwent lead testing. In addition, every caregiver was given a “Gun Safety in the Home” teaching sheet, regardless of whether they said there were firearms in their home. Fifteen trigger locks and 38 cable locks were distributed.

We collected 19 survey responses from the United Community Center events. Responses were overall positive with 84% of respondents stating they were very satisfied or satisfied with the event. Injuries most commonly sustained by their children included bike, skateboard, or scooter related injuries (45%), falls (45%), and animal bites (27%). Asks for future events included education surrounding playground safety and materials regarding affordable car seats. Survey responses from the Midtown Clinic event are still being collected.

PST is a mobile and budget friendly injury prevention program that seeks to include children and families that may be at higher risk for unintentional injury. PST is adaptable and reproducible in different settings. Program evaluation is essential to ensure that topics covered and resources provided are applicable to each community’s individual needs.

1. Pop-Up Safety Town (PST) is a pediatric injury prevention program developed to address the limitations of a “traditional” Safety Town and include children and families who otherwise are unlikely to have access to injury prevention education and/or resources.
2. PST events are tailorable to each community.
3. Program evaluation is essential to ensure that topics covered and resources provided are applicable to each community’s individual needs.

hide abstract details

Richard Gist, PhD
Laura Kemerling, MSN, RN, C-NPT, CPST
Bob Renton
Rohan Akhouri, MD, MPH
Katie Macmillan, MD

Residential injuries to children result in more than 4 million ED visits annually, representing nearly 40% of total ED visits; more than half a million are moderate to severe with nearly 75,000 admissions resulting (1). Charlie’s House, the nation’s only safety demonstration house, addresses a wide range of household safety matters through immersive demonstrations but the program’s reach is severely limited by the necessity of visiting a single, fixed location—a common limitation of many safety outreach programs. Charlie’s House Virtual Safety Experience (VSE) delivers a similar set of experiences in the context of a readily accessible, highly interactive online experience usable in a variety of digital media devices.

Amazon/AWS partnered with Charlie’s House to create a series of interactive virtual experiences that reconstructs much of the information presented in a physical tour of Charlie’s House. Each element was reviewed by a panel of safety professionals to identify the risk factors, place it into a relatable context, and provide simple, straight-forward mitigation strategies that can be implemented with limited effort or expense. The beta version was released at the International Consumer Product Health and Safety Organization’s (ICPHSO) 2024 International Symposium in Brussels, Belgium for broader expert input, and the final version was released in February 2025 at the ICPHSO Annual Symposium in Orlando, Florida.

The beta version had 57 downloads with 11 individuals providing feedback and suggestions through a short, voluntary survey. More than 2,070 downloads had been recorded as of May 2025. Anecdotal feedback from users has been overwhelmingly positive, including successful in situ utilization by home visiting professionals, child protective services, and other outreach personnel. Amazon/AWS provides additional assistance with platform expansion and dissemination. Several other retail and specialty platforms are exploring active partnerships as well; this broadening will enable implementing “click through” pathway capabilities, allowing consumers to compare products available from various vendors and promoting mitigation strategies. Such features potentially highlight Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association (JPMA) or similar safety certifications, empowering consumer action while salience is highest. Subsequently, digital output analytics will facilitate moving to more definitive outcomes involving mitigation devices added to one’s home.

The unique partnership between Amazon/AWS and Charlie’s House has facilitated development of a state-of-the-art, interactive safety experience with a wide and rapidly expanding range of avenues to deliver household safety instruction, mitigation strategies, and ultimately direct, real-time access to acquire products and devices from an assortment of vendors. Early users find utility in a variety of settings, greatly expanding the reach and the impact of Charlie’s House and its experiential safety programs. The feedback from users helped refine informational and operational aspects of the platform. Regional grant funding will be supporting further development of automobile, bicycle, and pedestrian elements, including enhancements to analytics functions; additional partners are exploring opportunities for participation and support.

1. Download and interact with the Charlie’s House Virtual Safety Experience.
2. Explore the features of the platform and its potential applications in improving household safety.
3. Examine the benefits of partnership between safety related agencies/organizations and vendors/providers of various products to expand reach and impact of information delivery to caregivers.

hide abstract details

Gia Ramsey, MBA, ADN, LPN, CPST-I
Julia Glauboch, RN, CPST

Pediatric injury prevention efforts often miss preteens and non-traditional caregivers, despite their important roles in child safety. To address these gaps, Maimonides Medical Center became a Safe Sitter® site in 2016, offering competency-based and medically accurate safety training to adolescents in Brooklyn. Staten Island University Hospital joined the initiative in 2019. Together, the hospitals now deliver three evidence-based programs—Safe Sitter®, Safe@Home, and Grandparents: Getting Started—to provide age-appropriate safety education to a broad audience across NYC.

Each course targets a specific population:

- Safe Sitter® (launched 2016/2019): A full-day course for youth ages 11–13 covering childcare skills, safety, first aid, and CPR. - Safe@Home (added 2021): A 90-minute course for students in grades 4–6 focused on safe decision-making and emergency preparedness when home alone. - Grandparents: Getting Started (added 2025): A 3-hour class for older caregivers covering current recommendations on safe sleep, behavior management, and injury prevention practices.

In 2024, Gia and Julia supported the onboarding of NYCHHC Kings County Hospital as an independent Safe Sitter® site, expanding reach in Brooklyn. In early 2025, the NYC Regional Trauma Advisory Committee (RTAC) Injury Prevention Subcommittee was awarded a grant from the American Trauma Society (ATS) to support expansion of Safe Sitter programming across New York City. The grant funds onboarding at five new hospital sites—one in each borough—each of which will receive instructor training and student handbooks to implement one or more of the three Safe Sitter courses based on local needs. Sites are currently completing onboarding paperwork and preparing for implementation.

To date, over 100 youth and caregivers have completed courses at Maimonides and SIUH. Student evaluations show that participants find the courses engaging and practical. Common feedback highlights favorite parts of the class, such as learning first aid, practicing with manikins, or gaining confidence in babysitting. Many students express plans to use their skills to stay home alone, babysit, or care for younger siblings.

Caregivers participating in the Grandparents: Getting Started course report appreciation for current safety recommendations and hands-on learning opportunities. Expansion sites are on track to begin programming by late 2025, with initial onboarding nearly complete.

Safe Sitter programming fills a longstanding gap in injury prevention for middle school-aged children and caregivers. Through strong hospital collaboration and grant support, this model has scaled citywide while remaining responsive to local needs. The borough-based expansion offers a replicable blueprint for trauma centers aiming to embed evidence-based injury prevention across diverse urban populations.

1. Describe how Safe Sitter®, Safe@Home, and Grandparents: Getting Started programs support age- and role-specific injury prevention.
2. Understand the value of hospital partnerships and structured onboarding to scale education initiatives.
3. Recognize how external funding can support sustainable and equitable program expansion across geographic regions.

hide abstract details

Jill Solomon, MPH, CHES

The Checkpoints program is designed to educate parents and teens about teen driving risks and encourage them to create a Parent-Teen driving agreement. Using feedback from partners, we have collaborated with specialists to enhance the program's reach and accessibility.

We partnered with the Tennessee Department of Health, Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center, and Wyoming Department of Health to implement the Checkpoints program. Feedback from these agencies helped us identify barriers. In 2024, we collaborated with MindSpring to improve the program's language, structure, and design and with BoxCar to enhance the website's technical features.

Partner conversations revealed the need for several site improvements to boost engagement and reach. In the Tennessee version of the program, between August 2021 and February 2024, we observed over 18,000 pageviews but only 17 agreements, indicating that participants were not completing the critical agreement portion. Stakeholders also noted difficulties in accessing necessary reporting information, such as participant names and total agreements. Furthermore, tracking revisits to the agreement was not possible, limiting valuable insight into user engagement. Identified platform limitations included email reminders, registration bugs, and navigation issues, as well as needs related to content framing, design, reporting, and accessibility.

In response to stakeholder feedback and partnership expertise, we enhanced the Checkpoints program. With MindSpring, we transitioned content from video-based to reading and activity-based and split the program into separate sections for teens and adults to complete individually, adding tailored behavioral content. We also reduced the reading level. BoxCar's collaboration improved site navigation and technical aspects, simplifying participant use and administration.

By improving the platform, we believe that we will be able to increase the number of people completing the driver agreement. Ultimately, this will help keep teen drivers safe during their first year of licensure.

1. How to work with vendors to create an online intervention.
2. How to work with external partners to gather actionable feedback for interventions.
3. How to incorporate behavioral content into a teen driver safety intervention.

hide abstract details

Taylor Hautala, MPH
Jill Solomon, MPH, CHES
Matthew Myers, MPH
Nichole Burnside, MBA
Carrie Nie, MPH
Shelli Stephens-Stidham, MPA
Jason Goldstick, PhD
Douglas Wiebe, PhD

Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs) are a critical tool for hospitals to identify and address a community’s health priorities. Despite the high burden of injuries and violence in the United States, these issues are thought to be underrepresented in CHNAs. For example, in a recent study of CHNAs in 20 cities with the highest rates of violence, only 32% reported violence as a priority need. Nearly 26% of CHNAs did not mention the word “violence” at all in their report. Given that unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for individuals aged 1-44, including pediatric populations, this lack of representation is a missed opportunity for hospitals to engage in injury prevention. We worked with Safe States Alliance to develop guidance for hospital-based injury programs on the questions to ask that could better represent injury in their assessments.

CHNAs were systematically analyzed from 40 hospitals across the U.S. to assess their inclusion of injury prevention topics. To ensure that we were selecting a geographically diverse sample of CHNAs, we geolocated and mapped the location of each hospital publishing the CHNA. Diversity, in terms of CHNA service area urban/rural classification and social vulnerability, was also considered. The project team then developed a list of injury and violence prevention keywords to flag while reviewing the community health needs assessments. The project team created and utilized a text mining software that identified the use of each keyword within each CHNA. This software counted and identified the occurrences of keywords within CHNAs. Reviewers then manually examined each keyword instance to confirm appropriate contextual use and to identify potential questions to be recommended for CHNA inclusion.

The injury domains most commonly addressed in the CHNAs included mental health and suicide (97.5% of sample used at least one term from this domain) and substance abuse (95%). Domains that were least addressed were drowning (0%) and burns (2.5%). These findings underscore the need for questions and assessments related to drowning and burns in the CHNA process, especially given their disproportionate impact on pediatric populations. Addressing these gaps may help drive the allocation of new resources toward prevention efforts in these areas.

These findings have informed the creation of sample questions for specific injury-related domains, such as abuse/neglect, concussion, violence, drowning, burns, and motor vehicle crash. We hope that these questions can act as a starting point for CHNA teams to better represent injury in their assessments. Future research might involve the development of a validated key word bank, creation of a larger list of useful questions and guidelines for CHNA development, and evaluation of changes over time.

1. Identify gaps in injury prevention representation in CHNAs and its impact on communities
2. Describe a systematic approach to assessing CHNAs for injury & violence content
3. Explore potential methods for integrating injury-related questions into CHNAs