Objectives and strategies of unintentional injury prevention and control in 31 provincial Children's Development Outlines in China

Abstract

Objective: To landscape the contents, similarities, and differences of the objectives and strategies for unintentional injury prevention and control in the national and 31 provincial Children's Development Outlines from 2011 to 2020, and propose relevant suggestions. Methods: The content analysis method was used to extract, encode and classify the objective and strategy text of unintentional injury in all Children's Development Outlines and construct the theme of strategy text combined with the '5E' Injury Prevention Framework. Taking the national Children's Development Outline as the benchmark, the relevant contents of 31 provincial Children's Development Outlines in the same period were compared. Results: All Children's Development Outlines took child injury prevention and control as the primary objective set in health, environment, and safety. The national and most provincial Children's Development Outlines set this goal in health, while others put it in environment or safety. Reducing injury-induced death, disability and occurrence were designated as the main content in the objective of child injury prevention and control. However, there were no quantitative requirements for injury occurrence and disability in all the provincial outlines. The themes of unintentional injury prevention and control strategies in all Children's Development Outlines could be divided into the mechanism, law enforcement, education, environment, engineering, first aid, assessment, and economic strategies. Mechanism strategy was the primary domain, followed by law enforcement, education, environment, and engineering strategies, but less attention was put on first aid, assessment, and economic strategies. The unintentional injury prevention and control strategy in the provincial Children's Development Outlines was mainly based on the national outline. Still, it also varied with some emphasis and refinement in different items among all the provinces. Conclusions: Children's Development Outline is a vital policy guarantee for implementing child injury prevention and control work. Developing a system involving good primary data, mechanisms and strategies, law enforcement, and environmental and engineering-related strategies for more common types of child injuries has been attached to great importance. Actively carrying out assessments and encouraging the adoption of more economical strategies could further enrich and improve the unintentional injury prevention and control in Children's Development Outline and promote the progress of related work in China.