Childhood Injury Prevention through Community-Based Participatory Research

The purpose of this research is to create a multi-disciplinary society where community members, educators, engineers, manufacturers and policy makers work together for injury prevention, recognizing one another’s strengths. In this paper, we first discuss how the power of injury prevention is strengthened by employing a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach. “Love & Safety Omura Study” is implemented in collaboration with medical institutions, the local school board, day-care centers and kindergartens, the police department and the fire department in Omura, Nagasaki, Japan as the first CBPR project on childhood injury. We collected data on traumatic injuries that occurred in Omura, Nagasaki, Japan and extracted 99 children’s injury cases. As a result of data analysis, the number one cause of injury was falls followed by bicycle-related injuries, car crashes, and collisions. For an educational purpose, we developed digital content based on the results. Based on injury frequency and severity, road traffic injury including bicycle-related injuries, burns, drowning, accidental1 ingestions, and falls were selected for the topics of digital content. We discuss how we designed digital content aimed at enhancing one’s perception of susceptibility to and severity of injuries. Lastly, we proposed a framework for implementing knowledge circulation-oriented CBPR on real life problems.