Injuries to children runover in driveways in Aotearoa NZ: scale, incidence and policy effectiveness.
The focus of Libby's PhD project is child safety on driveways. Driveway runover injuries (DRI) are a significant cause of preventable harm to children in Aotearoa NZ. However, we don’t know the exact number of DRI as the surveillance systems for and reporting of these injuries are inadequate. What we do know is that there are evidence-based interventions that could reduce the rates of these injuries, but these have never been systematically implemented and evaluated.
Libby aims to first calculate the incidence of driveway runover injuries in AoNZ, then to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention, Kāinga Ora’s driveway safety programme, which was implemented in 2013 but not fully evaluated. The programme involved making changes to the built environment: separating children’s play areas from driveways with fences and gates for standalone houses or installing speed bumps, speed restriction signs and convex mirrors to housing complexes. She will investigate the rates of DRI in children living in Kāinga Ora properties pre- and post-implementation of the Driveway Safety Programme and compare them to a control group of children living in non-Kāinga Ora housing over the same period. The control group will be matched for socioeconomic status, tenure, age, gender and ethnicity. She will then calculate a rate ratio which will show if and to what extent the programme was effective in reducing DRI. Finally, Libby will make recommendations on how to improve children’s safety on driveways.
For further information, contact Libby Grant libby.grant@otago.ac.nz