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Home › Articles › Home Safety Issues › Driveway Safety

Driveway Safety

Know the Facts to Prevent Backovers and Other Accidents

By Kelly Burgess

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Dr. Henri R. Ford, vice president and chief of surgery at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, was working at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh when he became interested in researching non-traffic, motor-vehicle-related accidents after noticing a pattern of serious incidences in the emergency room. He says they were the most difficult cases for him to deal with because other relatives – in one instance a grandfather, in another the child's father – had caused the devastating injuries and were completely inconsolable. As a father himself, he couldn't imagine how they would ever recover as a family.

Subsequent research by Dr. Ford revealed that over a 13-year period, 64 children treated at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh had sustained motor-vehicle-related injuries in a driveway. And that was just one hospital. He went on to co-author an article on the topic for the journal Pediatrics. The purpose of the article, Dr. Ford says, was to increase awareness of the types of accidents that he was seeing in his emergency room.

"What we were advocating at the time, and what the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended, was that pediatricians needed to be in the forefront of educating parents regarding the perils of the driveway," Dr. Ford says. "That's something parents don't think of, but when you're seeing your pediatrician and he's telling you about things like home safety, and being careful about chemicals and other common dangers, he can also tell parents of the danger of a child being run over in the driveway."

The obvious first step in preventing accidents is to never leave a child unattended, but that's not always realistic. Parents get distracted, sometimes one parent thinks another relative is watching the child, or thinks the child is in one place when he isn't. With that in mind, Dr. Ford recommends the following:


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