Safety first at car seat clinic
Training session offered so professionals can help parents
Shawn Giilck
Northern News Services
Published Thursday, October 30, 2014
INUVIK
Car seat safety is one of the most important things parents can do to protect children, and it's something that's too often sadly neglected.
A car seat clinic was held at the Inuvik Fire Hall Oct. 23. Several people from various health and social service agencies attended for the training, which also included a hands-on clinic. Participants included Lisa Burns, left, and Meegan Nicholson holding the seat in front while, standing from left, are Linda Reid, Agnes Francis, Wyman Conway, Crystal Navratil, Charlene Blake, Linda Eccles, Winnie Greenland and Sharon Awichen. - Shawn Giilck/NNSL photo
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That was one of the messages coming out of a car seat clinic and training session held at the Inuvik Fire Hall Oct. 23.
Sponsored by the GNWT, the workshop taught about a dozen members of health and social service agencies from around the Beaufort-Delta region how to install the seats so they can train parents.
"Car seat safety is very important to the nurses at the hospital because we need to educate new parents when they leave," said Lisa Burns of the Beaufort-Delta Health and Social Services Authority. "We really had no program in place. Most of us had no knowledge of proper car seat safety to teach them."
Meegan Nicholson, another health authority staff member, said "I'm here because I wanted some more knowledge to give (new parents) when they go home with their baby, because we really don't have programs in place right now."
Installing a car seat properly is not the easiest task.
"I'd just like to have more solid information to give them. And it's very difficult to install a seat."
Linda Eccles of Healthy Families in Inuvik said "I'm looking forward to seeing more educational sessions on car seats, because not enough people in our community are using them. I don't think people are being educated enough, and there's not enough people here trained to be car seat technicians."
Linda Reid from the Child Passenger Safety Network was in charge of the clinic. She had been hired to lead the class in Inuvik.
"What we see throughout Canada is that more than 90 per cent of car seats are installed incorrectly," she said. "It's a variety of factors. There's a lack of understanding on parents' parts on how the equipment works to start with. And there's a lots of different styles and models of vehicles and car seats, and an infinite variety of sizes of babies, that when you combine all that together it can be a bit of a challenge."
The seats themselves and the accompanying instruction manual are some of the chief headaches for anyone installing them, Reid added.
"Oftentimes people don't have the owner's manual for the seat, or for their vehicle," she added, making it more difficult still.
"What I think I'm going to see here as a challenge is that the law here in the NWT is quite a bit behind the times in relation to the rest of the country, so I think the challenge here will be getting to parents to recognize how important it is to keep their kids rear-facing as long as possible.
"At the other end of the scale, just because your child is 40 pounds, that doesn't mean you put them in a seat belt. They should go into a booster seat, but there isn't a booster seat law in the NWT."
It was the first time she had been to Inuvik to offer the course on behalf of the GNWT. The plan, Reid said, was to have at least a couple of people trained in each community to help educate parents.
Some of the local professionals mentioned how it can be difficult to even acquire a car seat in locations such as the Delta.
Burns said she wasn't sure if there was any store locally where you can buy a car seat, and many people order online.
Even in Yellowknife, Reid said, it can be nearly impossible to find an infant car seat to purchase.
"Finding the product is a challenge," she said. "But the most common problem we see is that the car seat isn't installed tightly enough, or the child isn't harnessed tightly enough."
That's partly due to some basic design flaws, Reid said, and a lack of training for parents.
It's difficult enough to install one seat, but most parents don't have only one child, which complicates matters too, Reid said.
"Vehicles aren't necessarily designed to be user-friendly to install car seats, either," she said.
More children are killed in car accidents, particularly when they weigh from 40 to 80 pounds, than any other cause, Reid said.
"Those are the children dying in car crashes."
