To effectively evaluate children’s health conditions and prevent childhood injuries, community assessment and intervention by community nurses are required as a unit of care. It has been reported that community health nurses provide help to all families with children in Australia [8]. These nurses, who have postgraduate qualifications, possess the ability to give support for free to the health of children. Furthermore, since they also possess solid professional knowledge on how to take care of newborns and young children, they can provide extensive professional advice to families [9]. In addition, these community nurses visit families, check the health condition of the children, provide health education and offer telephone consultations [10]. A previous study suggested that the nutritional status of children in Africa could be assessed promptly and accurately by community-based nursing [11].
National policies have begun to intervene in the prevention of unintentional injuries [12]. In the past 2 years, the Ministry of Education had launched a safety education platform for schools, focusing on students’ self-participation. The incidence of unintentional injuries among children in our hospital was relatively high; children accounted for 43%, which was consistent with Zhao Jingmei’s report [13]. Therefore, our hospital organised the collaboration of nursing experts from relevant departments to tackle the city’s situation and deliver safety education in urban communities. The hospital expanded its audience for the education programme to include pregnant women with a gestational age of more than 32 weeks as well as guardians of children being vaccinated. Pregnant women with a gestational age of more than 32 weeks are close to giving birth, and for these women, the safety and care of children are what they urgently need.
The guardians of children being vaccinated needed to observe their infants for half an hour after the vaccinations, and they were given infant safety education. In their presentations, nursing experts in the declining community focused on case education and on-site simulations. On-site guardians participated together and simultaneously completed the questionnaire surveys. In this study, the safety presentations in declining communities corresponded to the audience’s understanding of the knowledge. Consequently, the questionnaire score improved significantly. Furthermore, the community’s implementation of this safety education played a positive role in strengthening the prevention of unintentional injuries by parents.
The top five unintentional injuries in children were from falls, sharp objects, burns and scalds, swallowing of foreign bodies and traffic accidents. These unintentional injuries mainly occurred at home before the safety education was delivered. Before the education, the safety awareness of caregivers was not in place. A lack of safety knowledge was the main reason for unintentional injury, and the safety of the children depended entirely on the parents or caregivers [14]. However, even if parents or guardians might have thought it necessary to let go and don’t look at the baby, they should be able to foresee dangers in the environment around them and pay attention to possible hazards from food and household products. Therefore, the protective measures of the content meant for the declining community mainly stated that the guardians of children should strengthen the prevention of unintentional injury, especially in the home environment. Hence, people would find it easier to control and improve the prevention of fall injuries, the swallowing of foreign bodies and the occurrence of burns. For example, people could fit guardrails in places where children might find it easy to climb and fall, properly store small objects to prevent them from being swallowed and improve the temperature management of food and drink at home to prevent children from being scalded. Through safety education, the guardians gained a better sense of safety only after they had fully understood the potential dangers.
Anticipating that something may be dangerous creates a defensive response to the potential danger, for example, not locking young children indoors when they are alone and adding guardrails to balconies. Many parents of children pay much less attention to children’s safety education than their intellectual development [10], and these details are often ignored by young parents.
In this study, parents and caregivers were given detailed safety education. People confronted the potential safety risks faced by children at different stages of activity and the emergency treatment measures for various safety accidents, which effectively improved the awareness of parents and caregivers in preventing accidents, minimised the occurrence of unintentional injury and reduced the harm caused by unintentional injury.
Children’s unintentional injuries were more common in boys. This result was similar to the findings of Wang Wenchao's research. The physical and psychological development of young children is rapid, especially after the age of 3 years, when boys are naughty, active, courageous, adventurous and sporty. As children get older, it becomes more difficult for guardians to protect them when they participate in activities outside of the home. Children cannot recognise dangers as their parents or guardians can; therefore, boys are relatively more injured in accidents than girls. From Table 4, it can be seen that community activities as guardians still need to implement safety measures and interventions for children of different sex.
Finally, this study did not include a control group which should be included in future research.
