The Educational Value of a Single Injury Prevention Counseling Encounter

In this month's Pediatrics electronic pages, Powell et al¹ compare the efficacy of verbal versus pictorial materials used to implement a single injury prevention teaching episode directed to a group of clinic parents. The patient population in the study was drawn from low-income urban families. Based on other studies, the parents were presumed to have less than 9th-grade reading levels and were therefore possibly less likely to benefit from The Injury Prevention Program (TIPP) sheets of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) as opposed to pictorial anticipatory guidance (PAG) sheets that the authors designed. The authors do not reference their method of determining the reading level of the TIPP materials (stated to be 9th grade), but the AAP-assessed grade level is 6.3 using …

Address correspondence to Joel L. Bass, MD, Director of Ambulatory and Community Pediatrics, MetroWest Medical Center, 115 Lincoln St, Framingham, MA 01702-9167.