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What is the Child Safety Action Plan project?
The Child Safety Action Plan project is a large scale initiative whose aim is to develop government endorsed national action plans in countries in Europe that enhance child and adolescent safety by increasing awareness of the injury issue and uptake of proven prevention strategies by government, industry, professionals and organisations in areas that relate to child and adolescent safety, and families themselves.
The initiative involved three objectives with the desired outcomes of government endorsed national child safety action plans and increased capacity at the national level to undertake such activities. The three objectives were the development of 1) child safety report cards and profiles based on a set of indicators, 2) a good practice guide for child safety highlighting evidenced strategies proven to reduce child and adolescent injury and 3) a Child Safety Action Plan development and mentoring processes to facilitate country partners in national plan development.
Child Safety Action Plan development is underway in 18 countries, led by Alliance partners in each of the participating countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Spain and Sweden. In addition five countries chose to follow the process as observers: Cyprus, England, Finland, Iceland and Malta.
The initiative is led by the European Child Safety Alliance of EuroSafe with co-funding and partnership from the European Commission, the Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL), UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, the Universities of Keele and the West of England, WHO – European Office and partners in each of the 18 participating countries.
More information on purpose and partners involved can be found here.
Meeting the objectives...
Child Safety Report Cards and Profiles
Child Safety Report Cards and Profiles serve as part of the assessment phase in the development of child safety action plans. They summarise a country’s performance to July 2006 with respect to the level of safety provided to children and adolescents through national level policy. A set of child and adolescent indicators was assembled, standardised tools and data collection processes were developed and a baseline of the measures was collected. Country report cards and profiles were developed using the indicator data and served to inform planning by identifying countries’ strengths and weakness in relation to child safety. The report cards and profiles also assist countries in the identification of critical issues in the bigger picture upon which subsequent strategic planning and action planning would take place. These products also provide a baseline for future benchmarking and evaluation. More on the individual Child Safety Report Cards and Profiles and an 18 Country Summary can be found here.
Child Safety Good Practice Guide
The current evidence on what works in child and adolescent injury prevention was collected and reviewed and a good practice guide for unintentional injury prevention for children and adolescents was developed to support selection of evidenced good practice strategies during strategic planning. More on the Child Safety Good Practice Guide can be found here.
Child Safety Action Plan Mentoring
To support Child Safety Action Plan development a mentoring process involving both specific capacity building activities and the availability of continuing day-to-day support was developed for country partners. This approach supported progress through the Child Safety Action Planning process and also allowed monitoring of country progress and challenges as they progressed through the process.
Mentoring support was a day-to-day activity resourced by a full time position and included contact by phone, email, Communiqué (electronic newsletter), meetings with secretariat, sharing with other participating countries, and Child Safety Action Plan updates at Alliance Steering Group meetings. Three official face-to-face meetings were held – an orientation meeting, a capacity building workshop and an update meeting, but country partners were also provided with other opportunities to share progress and challenges. More on the mentoring process can be found under the discussions on Building Capacity and Planning Action! in the initiative summary Action Planning for Child Safety (3,5 MB).
Action planning for child safety...
The work in the three areas described above supported the partners in each of the 18 participating countries who were engaging government and national partners in a national process and coordinating child safety action plan development efforts in three broad stages: Assessment, Strategic Planning and Action Planning. The approach proven to be successful with partners and all participating countries have made some progress towards developing a national plan.
An overview and progress report on this strategic and coordinated approach to reducing child and adolescent injury in Europe, including a more detailed description of the process is available for downloading Action Planning for Child Safety (3,5 MB). An update of the table on page 16 of this report to December 31, 2007 is available here. In addition a detailed technical report is available upon request and country specific summaries on progress are available by country here.
For more information on the initiative contact the project secretariat at: secretariat@childsafetyeurope.org
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