Reduced emergency department (ED) visits to treat the overdose of medication among children who are less than five years old is a primary national health concern.
“The Healthy People 2030 objective to reduce pediatric medication overdoses has helped the PROTECT Initiative drive national prevention efforts — and, with those efforts, we look forward to achieving the target well before the end of the decade,” says Dr. Michael Bell, deputy director of the CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.
Translating National Data Into Action to Keep Children Safe
PROTECT Initiative actions are governed by the data collected at the national level on ED visits to prevent unintentional drug overdoses among children. The data obtained from National Electronic Injury Surveillance System — Cooperative Adverse Drug Event Surveillance (NEISS-CADES) Project estimate that every calendar year, in the United States:
Around 35,000 ED visits result from accidental drug overdoses in children younger than five years.
1 out of 250 2-year-olds receives treatment in an ED due to an accidental medication overdose
The majority of ED visits for accidental overdoses of medication among children less than five years old involve children who take medication independently, with no caregiver supervision
About five per cent of ED visits to treat unintentional drug overdoses in children less than five years old is because of medication mistakes
In the first half of 2000, ED admissions and hospitalizations due to unsupervised exposure to medication among children increased by 30 percent, reaching a high of 76,000 visits in the year 2010. To address this efforts to decrease the number of the risk of overdoses in children were put into place by the CDC’s PROTECT Initiative. Since 2008 the PROTECT collaboration has employed three-pronged strategies to ensure that children are safe from accidental medication overdoses
The collaborative approach of PROTECT has resulted in specific enhancements in each of the three areas of activity. PROTECT’s activities have proven that the use of improved safety packaging could protect against unsupervised drug ingestions or at the very least, limit the amount of medications that children are able to access by themselves. PROTECT participants have designed and refined the concept of exposure-limiting packaging, evaluated the effectiveness of certain inventive packaging designs for limiting access for young children and encouraged the use of novel safety packaging. In the decade of 2010, there was a the addition of flow restrictors (adapters created to stop the flow of liquid from bottles) on liquids for children that are available over-the-counter products that contain acetaminophen. This included cough and cold medicines (CCM) as well as voluntary removal from infant CCM product; as well as the labeling warnings about CCM consumption by children less than four years old was accompanied by a decrease in ED visits and poison centers requests for accidental overdoses of young children.
Consistently and clearly displaying volumestric measures (e.g. mL) on packaging for liquid medications labels, dosing devices can reduce the chance of mistakes when measuring and distributing dosages. PROTECT members have been involved in a variety of initiatives to promote usage of milliliters in prescribing, dispensing and communicating with caregivers and patients regarding oral liquid medications. They also have led efforts to improve the labels on medications bottles and dosing devices and have been involved in initiatives led by partners. Additionally, CDC, the Consumer Healthcare Products Association Educational Foundation as well as a wide range of PROTECT partners worked together on an Up and Away and Out of Sight campaign. It is focused around a few simple, data-driven measures that parents, grandparents and other caregivers can adopt to avoid overdoses of medication in children by utilizing secure methods of storage for medication.