Safe Kids Worldwide ~ Keeping Children Safe from Accidental Medication Overdose

As a mom of three little ones, I do what I can to keep my kids safe.  I try to take precautions to keep them from harm, but despite my best efforts I'm always learning that there's more I can do. For instance, Safe Kids Worldwide recently released a new research report that found kids are getting into medicine at an alarming rate! Every minute of every day, a poison control center receives call about potential medicine poisoning for a child age five and under. And 67,000 times each year, or every eight minutes, a young child goes to the emergency room for medicine poisoning. This is a 30
percent increase over the past ten years. Wow!

Due to these startling statistics, I was happy to read that Safe Kids Worldwide is raising awareness of medication safety to prevent these situations from happening! Thankfully we have never dealt with medical poisoning in our family. I'm pretty cautious about keeping medications up, hidden and out of reach from my kids. I also know kids watch their parents and imitate their behaviors, so I try to take medications away from them. I am however, learning that there's much more I can do to help keep them from harms way. For instance, have you ever thought about where you keep the vitamins, or even the pills in your purse. I never really had before, but thanks to Safe Kids Worldwide, it has now been brought to my attention that I need to keep EVERY single medication out of reach. That means putting it up right after I use it and not keeping it in my purse anymore.

Here are some other very helpful tips from Safe Kids Worldwide that I wanted to be sure and pass along:

• Put medicine and vitamins up and away and out of sight. (In 67 percent of emergency room visits for medicine poisoning, the medicine was left within reach of the child, such as in apurse, on a counter, or under a sofa cushion.)
• Even if you are tempted to keep it handy, put medicine out of reach after every use.
• Look around your home for products you might not think about as medicine, like rubbing alcohol, eye drops or gummy vitamins, and store them out of the reach of children.
• When you have guests in your home, offer to put purses, bags and coats where kids can’tget to them. (In 43 percent of emergency room visits for medicine poisoning, the child got into medicine belonging to a relative, such as an aunt, uncle or grandparent.)
• Be alert to medicine in places your child visits. Take a look around to make sure there isn’t medicine within reach of your child.
• Program the nationwide poison control center number (1-800-222-1222) into your phones.
• Visit SafeKids.org for more tips on safe storage, safe dosing and safe disposal of medicine.

I am so thankful that Safe Kids Worldwide is helping to raise awareness. I have learned a lot, and I hope you find these tips helpful as well! The following is a Safe Storage, Safe Dosing, SafeKids YouTube video you can check out.

You can also connect with Safe Kids World wide on Twitter and Facebook.
 

**I wrote this review while participating in a campaign for Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Safe Kids Worldwide and I received a promotional item to thank me for my participation