Ft. McMurray Coalition on Child Passenger Restraints

The activities of this program include:

1) Provide education and information on all infant and toddler car seats;
2) Provide drive-thru car seat clinics for parents, grandparents and caregivers;
3) Volunteer recruitment to provide manpower for drive-thru clinics;
4) Offer information sessions for ticketed drivers with seat belt or car seat infractions; and
5) Maintain an active coalition in the community including public health, volunteer groups and community members.

The evaluation of this program includes:

1) Documenting the number of requests for education or information; and
2) Statistics on car seat clinics including the number of car seats checked, number of seats with violations, types of violations and number of seats and children correctly installed.

Reason for Success

The program evaluation is successful because the statistics make us aware of the need to continue providing the drive-thru clinics. The number of participants to the clinics remain steady and the rate of violations remain high (80-90%) despite ongoing education.

Learnings

Through the evaluation, we learned that car seat installations can be very difficult for some parents and show the coalition the need to have the service and qualified personnel available to the community.

Challenges

The challenges of doing this evaluation were that the coalition has been providing drive-thru car seat clinics to the community for the past 3 years. The statistics for violations has not been improving. However, the participants in the drive thru clinics usually only attend once so we are always educating new participants. We do not have any statistics on people who have been to the clinic to evaluate if their seats are now consistently being installed correctly.

Contact Information:
Ms. Nadine Sopczak
Public Health Nurse
Northern Lights Regional Health Centre
Ft McMurray, AB
T9H 1P2
Tel: 780-791-6237
Fax: 780-791-6288