In the spring of 1988 I had the honour to serve as the Felton Visiting Professor in Melbourne, Australia. Giving 7 or 8 lectures in 5 days while jet-lagged proved to be a huge ordeal and I don’t think I made a great impression. No, that is not entirely accurate: I was a great hit […]
Category: Offbeat
Preventing clothing-related burns in children
Burn injuries are dreadful for any person of any age, but arguably they are most horrific for our most vulnerable: children. In Australia as in many other countries, we have mandatory standards which regulate the design and labelling of children’s nightwear. Having grown up in a rural area where we heated our house (our melted marshmallows and […]
Engagement: The fourth ‘E’ in injury prevention
Regular readers of the Injury Prevention blog will know what a keen advocate I am for the fourth ‘E’ in injury prevention: Engagement. I firmly believe that engagement is vital to transforming and translating education, engineering and enforcement efforts into real world advances in injury prevention. I know that in the domain of my own research […]
High school start and finish times
High school start and finish times can be a controversial topic! A quick search of school start and finish times in Queensland, Australia, my home ground, sees a range of start times generally between 8.20-9.00am, and a range of finish times generally between 2.30-3.30pm. High school start and finish times can be controversial indeed if you have […]
Response to John Langley from the Patron of Paper Cuts
For some while Langley and I have been debating whether injury prevention workers should try to prevent all injuries because (as I reason) we simply cannot predict which will be severe, or, as he argues, we need only prevent those that will be serious. After some back and forth, in a recent issue of Injury […]
Work-related traumatic brain injury
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can occur through various mechanisms, including violence and car crashes, but the mechanism of TBI I am focusing upon today is through a work-related injury. As a wife and mother, I know that I want my husband to return from work at the end of each shift in relatively the same […]
Non-suicidal self-injury: Another effective avenue of intervention?
The 10th of October is World Mental Health Day, and here in Australia a variety of activities helped ensure that mental health was openly discussed during Mental Health Week (5-12 October). As a researcher who works with adolescents, I am interested in their mental health, particularly as it can have pervasive implications for their injury prevention. […]
Pedestrian safety video worth watching
Ted Miller, editorial board member and famed for much else, kindly sent a link to an excellent youtube video that I urge you to watch. I do so because I have long cautioned that pedestrian signals can be dangerous if you assume that cars will always respect them. I plead with my friends, family, and […]
Different questions for more answers?
This week I have been pondering the larger issue. You may wonder what brought this on? I live in Queensland, the Australian state with the dubious title of ‘skin cancer capital of the world’. I was a child of the 70’s. We spent hours in the sun covered in all sorts of oil that smelled […]
Engagement appears the key
Regular readers of the Injury Prevention blog will be well aware with my obsession with engagement. Traditionally, injury prevention – such as in road safety – focuses on the “Three E’s” of Engineering, Enforcement, and Education. I think that Engagement is the fourth, often-forgotten, essential “E”, albeit it can be very tricky to actually manage, and manage effectively. I […]