Pediatric Injury Research
Center Leader: Flaura Winston, MD, PhD
Accidental injury is the leading cause of death for children over one year of age. It outnumbers the other leading causes combined, including cancer, congenital anomalies and homicide.
Understanding why accidental injuries occur can help parents, educators, policymakers and product manufacturers work together to help prevent them.
Pediatric injury research at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia is focused on the sources of injury, including automobile crashes, home safety, sports and bicycling, abuse, neglect and violence, and others.
The Pediatric Injury Research Affinity Group brings together physicians, nurses, engineers, behavioral scientists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, social workers and outreach professionals from throughout the Hospital to conduct focused research on the root causes of injury. Armed with this research, they then work together to develop and test interventions to prevent or minimize the impact of injury. Many of these researchers also are members of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention (formerly TraumaLink), a pioneering pediatric injury research center devoted to evaluating and preventing injuries to children through research to action.
The Hospital's crash-investigation team is part of the Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN), a multidisciplinary research network that provides the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the auto safety engineering community and the medical profession with the ability to jointly study real-world cases of serious injuries sustained in car crashes. CIREN's mission is to improve the prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of motor vehicle crash injuries through research.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Hospital also maintains a unique NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) called the Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies (CChIPS). Of the more than 40 I/UCRC centers nationwide, CChIPS is the only one that focuses solely on child injury prevention The center unites Children's Hospital and University of Pennsylvania researchers with automotive and insurance industry members to translate research findings into tangible innovations in safety technology and public education programs.
Currently, there are nine Industry Advisory Board members that contribute research dollars to support the CChIPS agenda: Britax Child Safety Inc.; Dorel Juvenile Group; Ford Motor Co.; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; Nissan Technical Center North America Inc., State Farm Insurance Companies®, TK Holdings Inc.; Toyota Motor North America Inc.; and Volkswagen of America Inc.
The Hospital has a long-standing research partnership with State Farm through Partners for Child Passenger Safety (PCPS), a research and advocacy program funded through 2007, the largest study ever conducted on children in automobile crashes. Since its launch in 1997, PCPS researchers have published more than 60 papers in scientific journals, 10 publicly available reports and a multimedia parent Web site available in English and Spanish.
In 2006 the Center for Injury Research and Prevention and State Farm formed an alliance called the Young Driver Research Initiative. The long-term goal of this multi-year study is to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a comprehensive program of interventions to reduce teen crash risk. Other Pediatric Injury Research Affinity Group investigators are conducting research in a wide range of areas, including suicide prevention; bully prevention; post-traumatic distress after pediatric injury; child crash test dummy design; injury biomechanics; new safety technology testing; and youth violence prevention.