Eurosafe Child Safety Action Plans
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Child Safety Action Plans  print friendly

What is the Child Safety Action Plan project?
The Child Safety Action Plan project is a large scale initiative whose aim is to develop government endorsed national action plans in countries in Europe that enhance child and adolescent safety by increasing awareness of the injury issue and uptake of proven prevention strategies by government, industry, professionals and organisations in areas that relate to child and adolescent safety, and families themselves.

To support reaching desired outcomes of a government endorsed national child safety action plan and increased capacity at the national level to undertake such activities in each of the participating countries three broad areas of activity are being undertaken: 1) encouraging adoption, implementation and monitoring of evidence-based good practices, 2) child safety report cards and profiles based on a set of standard indicators and 3) a Child Safety Action Plan development and mentoring processes to facilitate country partners in national plan development.
The first phase of CSAP involving 18 countries ran from 2004-2007 and results can be found here.


The second phase of CSAP involves 26 countries: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Wales. In addition eight countries have chosen to follow the process as observers: Croatia, Denmark, England, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland.

The initiative is led by the European Child Safety Alliance of EuroSafe with co-funding and partnership from the European Commission, the Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL), UNICEF, the Universities of Keele and the West of England, WHO – European Office and partners in each of the 26 participating countries. The initiative brochure can be downloaded here.

Encouraging evidence-based good practices
Evidence-based good practice is one of the focuses of the initiative and good practice is built into the CSAP development process. To support country partners in this the current evidence on what works in child and adolescent injury prevention was collected and reviewed and the Child Safety Good Practice Guide: Good investments in unintentional child injury prevention and safety promotion was developed and distributed. An update of evidence and additional case studies are planned for CSAP II.
More on the Child Safety Good Practice Guide can be found here.

Meeting the objectives...

Child Safety Report Cards and Profiles
Child Safety Report Cards and Profiles serve as part of the assessment phase in the development of child safety action plans. They summarise a country’s performance to with respect to the level of safety provided to children and adolescents through national level policy. Country report cards and profiles serve to inform planning by identifying countries’ strengths and weaknesses in relation to child safety and also assist countries in the identification of critical gaps upon which subsequent strategic planning and action planning can take place. These products also provide a baseline for future benchmarking and evaluation. More on the individual Child Safety Report Cards and Profiles and a 24 country summary can be found here.

Child Safety Action Plan Mentoring
To support Child Safety Action Plan development a mentoring process for country partners involving both specific capacity building activities and the availability of continuing day-to-day support is underway. This approach supports progress through the Child Safety Action Planning process, a nine step process divided into three broad phases: assessment, strategic planning and action planning. The mentoring process also allows monitoring of country progress and challenges as countries progress.

Mentoring support is a day-to-day activity resourced by a full time position and includes contact by phone, email, a project newsletter (the CSAP Communiqué), meetings between country partners and the secretariat, sharing with other participating countries, and country updates as part of European Child Safety Alliance Steering Group meetings. To date there have been two official face-to-face gatherings that combined a business meeting and a capacity building workshop. A third meeting is planned for late 2009.
Country specific activities and progress are described by country here. For more information on the initiative contact the project secretariat.

An overview and progress report on this strategic and coordinated approach to reducing child and adolescent injury in Europe, including a more detailed description of the process is available for downloading Action Planning for Child Safety (3,5 MB). An update of the table on page 16 of this report to December 31, 2007 is available here.