The Shanghai Children's Medical Center (SCMC) said almost all
the accidentally injured children treated in recent years came from
migrant families.
The hospital wants action taken to help protect these children
from accidents.
Medical experts from the SCMC, one of the three local children's
hospitals, gave special consultations and education courses to more
than 100 parents over the past month who wanted to learn how to
help prevent home accidents.
The hospital had been holding the monthly education course to
help parents understand the cause and prevention of accidents in
the home.
However most of the parents turned out to be locals and not
migrant parents for whom the courses were also designed.
"Our investigations into home accidents where children were
killed or injured in recent years showed almost all of them were
from migrant families, living in suburban areas in the city," said
Xia Lin, an official of the hospital.
"They rent cheap apartments downtown. Often the children are
looked after by grandparents who have little understanding of the
dangers. Many of the accidents happened when the adults were only
away for a couple of minutes," she said.
On Friday afternoon a four-year-old child fell to her death from
the balcony of her 8th floor home. She was pronounced dead from
serious internal injuries at the hospital at 4:15 PM, said Xia. She
said the girl's grandfather had left her to dump garbage only to
find the girl lying on the ground on his way back to the
building.
"We summarized our recent cases and found that falling from
heights and burning were the main causes of accidents responsible
for deaths and injuries of children between two and six years old,"
Xia said.
The hospital's two-year study found that 40 percent of
children's accidents happened at home. Nearly 250,000 children were
injured or killed in accidents every year in Shanghai, according to
local authorities.
Xia said the SCMC had been trying over recent years to help
migrant families improve their awareness of safety at home but more
needed to be done.
"We have teams visiting migrant families in suburban areas
several times a year but it's kind of difficult to get them,
especially the older people, to pay proper attention to the
seriousness of the issue," she said.
(Shanghai Daily September 3, 2007)