Parents: Safety app helps keep families safe at home

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), injuries are the number one cause of death of children with 50 percent of these accidents occurring in and around the home. Through this new Make Safe Happen initiative, Nationwide Children's researchers developed a new Make Safe Happen app to help prevent childhood injury. The app, now available for free on both iOS and Android, helps parents make their home safer. Parents can learn as they go with customized room-to-room safety checklists and links to safety products for the home.

"I have been an injury researcher for more than a decade, but it wasn't until I was pregnant with triplets that I realized the need to make safety easier for busy parents," said Dr. Lara McKenzie, a principal investigator with Nationwide Children's Hospital's Center for Injury Research and Policy (CIRP). "We created something that I needed as a mom, and that would give parents and caregivers the tools they needed to make their home safer for their family. You can create shopping lists, set reminders and track your progress towards making your home as safe as possible for your family. And you can do all of this on your smartphone."

Since the 1930s, Nationwide has played an active role in supporting this issue, including their engagement with CIRP, founded by Dr. Gary Smith, an internationally-recognized pediatrician and author of more than 150 child injury-related articles in peer-reviewed journals. Contributions made by the Nationwide Foundation to Nationwide Children's have supported important child safety research, and most recently the development of the Make Safe Happen app.

For more information on child home safety visit MakeSafeHappen.com.