“My child climbed on top of the television trolley and began shaking the television. It would have fallen on top of him if I hadn’t grabbed the TV in time.” – Ghazala Haseeb*, the mother of a young boy in Jamshed Town.
Dr Uzma Khan and Ms Rubaba Naeem didn’t expect to hear stories about television trolleys when they started a door-to-door survey of injury hazards in the home.
The two researchers from AKU’s department of emergency medicine (DEM) had seen data from seven hospitals across Pakistan about how unintentional injuries, or accidents in layman terms, accounted for one in four emergency room visits among children under the age of five.
The absence of information on the causes of these injuries led to them starting a community research project in Jamshed Town, Karachi, spanning over 500 households with young children. During the study, they noticed a number of safety hazards: from furniture with sharp corners, to stairs without railings, and even dangerous appliances such as irons within the reach of children. They also found that nearly half of all homes had a television placed on a low trolley with wheels.
“Many young children approach the television while watching their favourite show,” said Ms Rubaba Naeem, a research specialist in the DEM. “Since the trolley at a low height and is on wheels, children can easily pull the TV or push the trolley. This can lead to the TV tipping over and falling on top of them.”
A study by Safe Kids Worldwide states that a 36-inch television falling from three feet generates the same force as a one-year-old falling from a height of ten stories leading to limb and head injuries that require hospital care.
Insights from the study prompted the two researchers to apply to
Mentor-VIP, a global mentorship programme run by the World Health Organization in the area of violence and injury prevention. The programme put them in touch with Rennie Ferguson, an injury research specialist based at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who supervised their research into the burden of injuries caused by falling objects in the home.
Initial findings from their study, which covered six years of paediatric admissions to the Emergency Room at the University’s teaching hospital, found that four out of ten ER admissions attributed to falling objects involved television trolleys. Injuries suffered in 60 per cent of these TV tip-over cases were so severe that they required children to be admitted to the general ward and even the intensive care unit.
“We never thought that a source of entertainment could represent such a safety hazard to children in the home, said Dr Uzma Khan, a senior instructor in research in the DEM. “We now hope to prevent injuries from tip-over incidents by conducting community awareness sessions and by sharing educational materials about ways to avoid unintentional home injuries.”
The importance of their findings has already been recognised by their peers as the two researchers won the Best Emergency Department Relevance award for their presentation at the International Emergency Medicine Conference 2017 in Islamabad. Dr Khan and Ms Naeem are currently working on publishing a paper on their research on tip-over risk.
*The individual’s name has been changed to protect their identity.
