More than 20,000 children were treated in United States hospital emergency departments in 2005 for shopping cart-related injuries.
According to a study published in the August issue of Pediatrics and conducted by Gary Smith, MD, DrPH, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy (CIRP) in the Columbus Children's Research Institute at Columbus Children's Hospital, it was found that an in-store safety intervention successfully increased the use of child safety-restraints in shopping carts.
This study looked at the effectiveness of an in-store intervention to increase the use of shopping cart restraints for children five years of age and younger.
The in-store intervention consisted of greeters at the store entrance who encouraged the use of appropriate shopping cart restraints, plus a cash incentive coupon. Three stores served as intervention sites, and four stores were non-intervention sites. Trained study personnel conducted the observations unobtrusively in all seven stores, recording the status of shopping cart restraint use as caregivers approached the store checkout areas.
The increase in safety-restraint use in shopping carts was greater in the intervention stores than in the control group of stores. In the intervention stores, the percentage of correct restraint use increased from 15% before the intervention to 49% after.
"The good news is that we were able to significantly increase restraint use by young children in shopping carts with a modest in-store intervention," said Smith, the study author and a faculty member of The Ohio State University College of Medicine. "However, one-half of the children still remained unrestrained or incorrectly restrained despite our efforts."