Unintentional injuries are a leading cause of pain and death among young children. While injuries can range in severity — from cuts and burns to drownings and poisonings — clinicians agree that many are preventable.

Now, a study led by Johns Hopkins Children’s Center researcher Eliana Perrin and colleagues shows that an intervention program developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) dramatically reduces injuries in young children. The findings provide evidence for implementing The Injury Prevention Program (TIPP) in routine well-child care, the researchers conclude. 

“From this large study, we learned that a relatively simple intervention in pediatric offices really helps parents keep their children safe. TIPP uses what we know about how children develop to tailor the advice we give to parents at each stage, and it works,” says Perrin, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Primary Care and first author of the study, which included four academic medical centers in the U.S. and was published in Pediatrics.

At two of the centers, pediatrics residents were trained on TIPP and used the TIPP screening and counseling materials at all well-child checkups for patients from 2 to 24 months old. The two other centers did not use TIPP and instead implemented a separate, unrelated intervention program.

The findings show that sites using TIPP reported significantly fewer injuries in young children — with an estimated risk of reporting injuries across each of the well-child checkups of only 14% as opposed to more than double that (30%) in the control group. The team says their findings show that TIPP was able to significantly prevent injuries in young children, and that the benefits of TIPP improved as children got older.

A total of 781 parent and infant pairs were enrolled in the study. The majority of parents were Hispanic (51%) or Black (28%), and most were insured by Medicaid (87%).