One of the best parts of being able to blog for Injury Prevention is being able to reflect upon my own experiences (personal and professional) as I learn about the research of other injury prevention researchers. I suppose today’s blog has left me feeling a little frustrated, however, that maybe we aren’t making as much progress as we could be.

This morning I came across a paper summarising the hot-ash burns experience of 50 children in Western Australia in 2011 and 2012 (see the research of Martin, Rea, McWilliams, and Wood at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24280525), and this immediately led to the resurfacing of a memory from my own childhood.

As a young child (I was maybe five or six years old) I was shocked to hear that one of my friends, neighbours and best playmates had been seriously hurt during a camping holiday with her family. They had been camping, and just like every previous camping holiday, she had walked through the sand at the beach with her older brothers. The problem was that this sand was used to put out the fire which was used to cook the family’s dinner the previous night. Next day, it was if the fire hadn’t been extinguished in any way, and she sustained very serious burns to her feet.

that examined the exact same problem (eg., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18182906; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18789590), and made similar injury prevention recommendations.

More needs to be done if we are going to gain traction in the prevention of hot ash burns in our most vulnerable, our children.