Buckle Up America is a national campaign to increase the correct use of safety belts and child safety seats to help save lives and prevent injuries. The Iowa Governor’s Traffic Safety Bureau reports unbelted people brought to an emergency room are:
- Three times more likely to be hospitalized
- Eight times more likely to suffer head injuries
- Incurred three times more medical costs than belted persons
While the use of safety belts is a law in Iowa, about one in five Iowans didn’t use safety belts in 2005. Charles Jennissen, MD, director of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at University of Iowa Children's Hospital, says “I don’t know why people don’t use seat belts. Besides not smoking, there are very few things that a person can do that would have a greater potential impact on their long-term health and on how much longer they might live than always wearing a seat belt.
“This is especially true for children and young adults. The number one killer of our children is motor vehicle crashes. Wearing seat belts and properly using child safety seats are our best defense against this killer,” he says.
Children should always be properly restrained no matter how short the ride, no matter where their position is in the vehicle says Jennissen. This develops good habits that hopefully will be maintained as children enter their adolescent and young adult years; a time when their risk for a crash escalates as they begin to drive and also ride with other inexperienced drivers.
“A recent study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that over 80 percent of child safety seats with harness devices were critically misused in a way that might prevent the seat from properly reducing injury risk. Unfortunately, my experience from checking child safety seats in Iowa is similar.
“The most important thing is to read both the vehicle owner’s manual and the child restraint instruction manual for proper placement. Another important tip is to put your weight into it! You really want to get a tight fit between the child safety seat and the vehicle seat. One can accomplish this by putting your knee into the child safety seat to compress the vehicle seat while tightening the seat belt as much as possible.
“Some vehicles may have no middle seat belt in the back, lack adequate back seat space or have contoured seats that make proper installation of a car safety seat extremely difficult if not impossible. Families should consider this when purchasing their next vehicle,” says Jennissen.
“I encourage families to attend a car safety seat check-up event to have their installation evaluated by a certified car safety seat technician. These events are held frequently through the Johnson County SAFE KIDS Coalition,” he says.
The Linn County SAFE KIDS Coalition sponsors monthly car safety seat check-ups in Hiawatha (near Cedar Rapids) on the second Thursday of each month. Appointments are needed and can be scheduled by calling 319-310-SEAT. Other check-up sites throughout the state can be found at the Iowa SAFE KIDS website. Also, the National Highway Traffic Safety website has comprehensive information on proper child restraint seat use and is a great resource for families.
“When a traffic accident occurs, all improperly restrained occupants are at a tremendously increased risk,” says Jennissen. “Individuals ejected from the vehicle are much more likely to die or suffer serious consequences. This won’t happen if you properly use a seat belt or if a child is adequately placed in a car safety seat. And, interestingly, unrestrained individuals can become projectiles and injure those that are actually restrained. This frequently happens with adults who properly secure their children but not themselves.”
Children’s heads are much larger in proportion to the rest of their body as compared to adults he says. “So a serious head injury is often what an unrestrained child suffers. As we all know, a brain injury is not going to recover like other injuries one might sustain.
“In working with children in the emergency room, I see the difference in the injuries suffered by children who are properly restrained and those who were not when an accident occurs. It truly is dramatic.
“Many properly restrained individuals never have to come to the emergency room or are able to be discharged with only minor injuries. Granted, there are some crashes so severe that proper restraint cannot protect the individual from serious injury and unrestrained individuals are sometimes lucky enough to avoid serious injury when in a bad crash.
“But why take foolish risks? It is truly heart wrenching watching parents anguish over the serious injury or death of their child after a motor vehicle crash and lamenting the fact that they failed to protect and properly restrain them. It is just terrible and so often could have been avoided,” he says.
“Seat belt legislation has been the most effective tool in increasing the percentage of people properly restrained and protected from death and serious injury in Iowa and across the country says Jennissen. Iowa introduced a new child restraint law in January 1, 2006.
“This has led to decreased death rates and severity of injuries suffered in motor vehicle crashes. We don’t have much data since the implementation of the new Iowa child restraint law but there are Iowa children who already have been saved because of the of this law. This year’s Iowa legislative session failed to pass a bill requiring children 11 to 17 years of age to be restrained in a seat belt no matter where their position in the vehicle. Efforts will be made again this coming year to pass similar legislation and all Iowans should contact their local state legislators letting them know how they feel about keeping Iowa’s children safe,” he says.
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