Flaura Koplin-Winston and Dennis Durbin
Center for Injury Research and Prevention, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Our program focuses solely on advancing the safety of children, youths and young adults through research. Our team spans many disciplines: pediatricians, psychologists, statisticians, epidemiologists and engineers. No one discipline can sufficiently understand the complexities of injury prevention to translate science into comprehensive, effective interventions that save lives.

We describe our interdisciplinary approach as "research to action to impact." We start by identifying the biggest injury threats. Then, we conduct studies to measure and evaluate the risks. We use our findings to develop interventions, such as improved booster seat use, and measure their effectiveness. Working with an extensive network of collaborators, we have increased child restraint use from 51 percent to 79 percent and reduced deaths to children under age 8 by more than 15 percent since 1999 in the U.S.

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) strives to stimulate positive change in children's lives on a broad scale. That is why we partner with government agencies, nonprofits and committed corporations like Ford.

Our research highlighted the prevalence of "seat belt syndrome," a constellation of brain, abdominal and spinal injuries suffered in crashes by children who were restrained in safety belts rather than in age-appropriate child restraints. Ford stepped in with the Boost America! Campaign to raise awareness of proper child restraint use and distribute booster seats to families that needed them.

We recognized an impediment to new child restraint design: lack of tools to measure abdominal injury risks. CHOP engineers spent three years working with experts from Ford, the University of Virginia, Wayne State University and Takata Corporation to cooperatively develop a simulated child abdomen that fits into the standard six-year-old-size crash-test dummy. Several prototypes will be ready for evaluation later this year.

Children are not just small adults. We can't simply take what we learn from adult injury prevention and transfer it to children and teens without making adaptations that suit their specific needs. Because children are the primary occupants of the second and third rows in vehicles, automakers need to optimize restraints for them. In addition, auto companies must find ways to promote safe and responsible teen driving through advanced safety technologies and education and by ensuring that vehicle advertising does not promote speeding and unsafe driving. In this country, more than 5,000 14- to 17-year-olds die each year in car crashes.

To continue to advance child safety, we would like to see automakers increase their investments in child- and teen-focused crash injury surveillance systems to identify new hazards to children and youths. The lack of child-focused surveillance, for example, led to the mid-90s epidemic of deaths to children from high-powered air bags, an alarming problem identified by our team. Ford supports this surveillance work as one of only eight corporate members of the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies at our hospital.

Globally, traffic-related injuries rival infectious diseases as one of the leading causes of death. As part of CChIPS, we have begun the study of child passenger safety in Beijing, where 1,000 vehicles are added to the fleet each day. Parents and officials in China and other developing nations have little information on how to keep their children safe in cars. We need to ensure that as developing countries motorize, they do not repeat our mistakes in auto safety. We must help them build upon our considerable safety expertise.

Flaura Koplin-Winston, Co-Scientific Director and Founder
Dennis Durbin, Co-Scientific Director
Both of Center for Injury Research and Prevention, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia