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. 2015 Apr;42(1 Suppl):115S-122S.
doi: 10.1177/1090198114568306.

Preventing unintentional injuries in the home using the Health Impact Pyramid

Karin A Mack  1 , Karen D Liller  2 , Grant Baldwin  3 , David Sleet  3
Affiliations

Preventing unintentional injuries in the home using the Health Impact Pyramid

Karin A Mack et al. Health Educ Behav. 2015 Apr.

Abstract

Injuries continue to be the leading cause of death for the first four decades of life. These injuries result from a confluence of behavioral, physical, structural, environmental, and social factors. Taken together, these illustrate the importance of taking a broad and multileveled approach to injury prevention. Using examples from fall, fire, scald, and poisoning-related injuries, this article illustrates the utility of an approach that incorporates a social-environmental perspective in identifying and selecting interventions to improve the health and safety of individuals. Injury prevention efforts to prevent home injuries benefit from multilevel modifications of behavior, public policy, laws and enforcement, the environment, consumer products and engineering standards, as demonstrated with Frieden's Health Impact Pyramid. A greater understanding, however, is needed to explain the associations between tiers. While interventions that include modifications of the social environment are being field-tested, much more work needs to be done in measuring social-environmental change and in evaluating these programs to disentangle what works best.

Keywords: Health Impact Pyramid; falls; fire; injury prevention; poisonings.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Health Impact Pyramid. Note. Adapted from Frieden (2010).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Health Impact Pyramid for older adult fall prevention. Note. Adapted from Frieden (2010).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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