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COMMUNITY INITIATIVES – enjoying and achieving
 Our community safety initiatives are delivered to a wide audience to raise awareness and promote behavioural change in and around the home and play settings, to reduce serious childhood injury.
Whoops! can work with you to develop and deliver sessions to parents and carers. In the past Whoops! has been commissioned by PCTs, local authorities and Sure Start centres to deliver community learning sessions in a variety of settings, reaching nearly 6,000 adults every year in the community. Children and young people are injured as they go about their daily lives – as they travel from place to place, play and explore their environment both inside and outside the home, and even at times when they sleep.
Community learning sessions include statistical information, trends, facts and figures and preventative tools around accidents to children and cover the following topics:
• Home safety – ‘why do accidents to children matter’
• Burns and scalds – ‘Baby Burns’
• Toy safety - ‘playing it safe’
• Choking and poisoning management
• Christmas safety – seasonal
• Water and garden safety – seasonal
• Bullying – a parents guide
• Road safety – a parents guide
• ‘Honey where are the kids’ – Parental responsibility
• Baby and child lifesaving clinics – immediate first aid care
Children inhabit an environment largely constructed for adults, rather than designed for their own needs. Young children depend on adults to protect them and provide a safe world in which to develop. Young children’s small physical size, their behaviour and psychological characteristics make them vulnerable to injury. Injury prevention is important. Injuries cause:
• Pain, physical scarring and potentially years of painful treatment
• Post traumatic and emotional stress – both for the child and the family involved
• Blame, guilt, stress and depression following a serious injury to a child. This is a cost too hard to bear for most families.
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