Prescription for Child Safety: Put Medicines Up and Away, Out of Sight

Background: Each year, one of every 150 two–year–olds visits an emergency department (ED) in the United States for an unintentional medication overdose, most often after finding and consuming medicines without adult supervision. In recent years, this number has increased by 20 percent.

Program background: To address this public health issue, CDC and the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) Educational Foundation, in partnership with the PROTECT Initiative, launched Up and Away and Out of Sight– an educational program reminding parents and caregivers about safely storing medicine to prevent such potentially life-threatening overdoses. The program describes in plain language how parents and caregivers should store medicines safely; provides them information and tools to keep their child/children safe; and encourages them to take action.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  A new website and suite of materials were developed, and formative research was undertaken to understand whether the creative communication motivated audiences to keep medications out of childrens’ reach and sight. A guiding principle was ensuring materials were written to reach the broadest audience, utilizing plain language techniques. Knowing visual aids that reinforce key messages help boost consumers’ health literacy, we used original photography to illustrate our messages and a relatively new website platform to clearly convey how to keep kids safe.   Two qualitative research studies were conducted. The first tested the core messages and program name without any supporting graphics. The second field-tested draft materials with moms, the primary audience. Our messages were viewed as “compelling motivators” and welcome reminders. Parents in the formative research recognized one oversight leading to an unsupervised ingestion could result in an ED visit for their child. Up and Away and Out of Sight’has generated 480+ million media impressions since launching in December 2011 – reaching 55 million at launch. To drive awareness among a diverse audience, CDC and CHPA produced a print PSA and audio news releases (English and Spanish), a video, and issued press releases and mat releases. Educational materials including brochures, doctor’s office posters, a pledge, and tip sheets were also developed in English and Spanish and housed on UpAndAway.org for download and social media sharing. At launch, CDC hosted a Twitter chat which generated nearly 6 million impressions.   Reaching busy parents is never easy. Thus, CDC and CHPA coupled relevant data with timely hooks – cold and flu season when medicines are needed, holidays when families have visitors who may bring medication, and summer when many families are traveling and packing medicine – to make medicine safety more top-of-mind.

Conclusions: Up and Away and Out of Sight is an innovative public-private coalition that is keeping children safe through raising awareness on unsupervised ingestions. Factoring in strategic PROTECT partner efforts, the program’s earned 602+ million impressions. Parents have called the program “a wake-up call” to take action. One parent said, “It’s a great informational ad to remind us of the dangers of medicines to children.”

Implications for research and/or practice: This initiative demonstrates the importance of utilizing clear, concise messaging and plain language to ensure target audiences of various backgrounds and educational levels will grasp the critical messages.