Center for Childhood Injury Prevention

While the unintentional injury rate for children ages 14 and under has decreased more than 40% in the last two decades, injuries still kill or disable more children over age 1 than all childhood diseases combined.

Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death in children 14-years-old and younger in the United States. In 2012, more than 1200 injured children were admitted to Texas Children’s Hospital and many thousands more were treated in the Emergency Center.

Texas Children’s Hospital created the Center for Childhood Injury Prevention (CCIP) to tackle this issue in the Houston community. The center serves as the lead organization for Safe Kids Greater Houston, a local consortium of health and safety experts and volunteers who work together to educate and prevent pediatric injury using evidence-based best practice recommendations.

The Kohl’s Safe at Home Program is a year-round infant safe sleep awareness and home safety education program. The program's goal is two-fold: to educate parents on how to childproof their homes and identify potential hazards that may cause injury to their children, and to teach parents of infants less than 1- year-old how to reduce their child's risk for infant death by providing safe sleep education and resources for their babies. (Water safety added in 2015)

Child Passenger Safety Programming: Through a grant from the Texas Department of Transportation, CCIP staff works year-round to prevent injuries and fatalities sustained in motor vehicle crashes when children are improperly restrained. 

The staff educates parents and caregivers on how to correctly restrain their children, provides car seats and boosters to children in low-income communities, trains and mentors local technicians, and manages a large network of almost 20 mobile Inspection Station sites.

Toyota Buckle Up for Life: Local injury data indicates that Hispanic and African American children are disproportionately affected by motor vehicle crashes due to improper restraint.

The Toyota Buckle Up for Life program is a 3-year program aimed at increasing child passenger safety knowledge and reducing distracted and impaired behaviors (e.g. texting while driving) in African American and Hispanic populations using their faith houses as a venue for education.

Safe Kids Greater Houston: The Center for Childhood Injury Prevention serves as the lead organization for Safe Kids Greater Houston, a Coalition of health and safety experts, law enforcement, community advocates and other volunteers. The Coalition’s mission is to address major areas of unintentional injuries to children in our local area.

This is accomplished by raising awareness among adults and children, providing lifesaving education and resources, and making childhood injury a public priority. The major risk areas addressed are Child Passenger Safety, Water Safety, Home Safety and Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety.