On 6 May, HEAL member the European Child Safety Alliance with the support of Commissioner Vassiliou, Commissioner Kuneva and MEP Chair of Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee Arlene McCarthy launched the Child Safety Report Cards for 24 Member States in Europe and the Child Safety Report Card 2009 Europe summary for 24 countries. You can view the report cards and press release at www.childsafetyeurope.org.

Despite injury reductions and safety improvements achieved by many Member States over the last 20 to 30 years, injury remains a leading cause of death for children and adolescents in every Member State in Europe. Each year about 10,000 children die needlessly in the European Union due to unintentional injuries. That is equivalent to losing an entire school classroom of children, more than 25 students, every day of the year. Yet it has been estimated by researchers that if all strategies known to be effective were uniformly implemented approximately 90% of these injuries could be prevented.

Released today are “Child Safety Report Cards” for 24 countries and the Europe Summary Report Card which score countries on their level of adoption, implementation and enforcement of over 100 proven, effective child injury prevention strategies – good practices known to save children’s lives. The good practice policies relate to road traffic accidents, drowning, falls, poisoning, burns, choking and supports, such as leadership, data infrastructure and professional capacity, necessary to combat child injury.

The report cards show that there is great variability between the best performing and poorer performing countries with injury death rates up to 4 times higher in the countries with poorer performance. Of the 24 countries that participated in these report card assessments, the highest over all unintentional child injury death rates are found in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and the lowest are found in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden. (4)

There is also great variability on uptake of the proven good practices noted in the report cards, between countries. Best child safety performance scores were achieved in Iceland, the Netherlands and Sweden, while the countries doing least well were Greece and Portugal.

The Child Safety Report cards are part of the assessment undertaken in the Child Safety Action Plan initiative being conducted through funding and partnership with the European Commission, Health & Environment Alliance (HEAL), UNICEF, World Health Organization (WHO) and the national partner organisations in 26 Member States.