ORLANDO – A brief intervention regarding driving safety is effective for encouraging the use of a new parent resource that promotes safe driving among teens, according to Jean Thatcher Shope, Ph.D.
In a prospective study, 133 trained pediatricians each delivered the 2-minute intervention to up to 35 individual parents, directing them to the Checkpoints web-based safe driving program. More than 50% of the parents visited the website. The parents clicked on an average of 4.2 pages and spent an average of 3.5 minutes at the site, Dr. Shope reported at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
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Trained pediatricians engaged parents in a 2-minute intervention, directing them to use a web-based safe driving program to help educate their teens about driving safety.
The Checkpoints Program is a free, evidence-based program that encourages parents to set limits on teen driving and to monitor novice drivers. It was developed by study coauthor Bruce Simons-Morton, Ed.D., at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The website includes teen driving statistics resources to help parents keep their teen drivers safe, and information about state-specific teen driving laws. It also includes an interactive component to help parents create a parent-teen driving agreement that addresses driving hours, number of passengers allowed, and other factors that can be modified over time as the driver becomes more experienced.
The website pages viewed most often were those on teen driving risks, site account registration, and state-specific teen driving laws, said Dr. Shope of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Ann Arbor.
Participating pediatricians were trained to deliver the brief intervention to parents of teens aged 14-17 years. The pediatricians used scripted materials, provided parents with a key chain imprinted with the website address, and referred parents to the website (youngdriverparenting.org), which will be sustained by the AAP. Parents were encouraged to register and use the interactive Checkpoints agreement and other materials.
The intervention was developed by Dr. Shope and her colleagues in collaboration with Pediatric Research in Office Settings (PROS) and the AAP’s practice-based research network.
Just a short message from a credible professional resource is effective for prompting the parents of teens to visit the Checkpoints website, Dr. Shope said, adding that with motor vehicle crashes topping the list of causes of death among teens, effective prevention measures above and beyond graduated driver licensing are needed.
Teen drivers whose parents are actively engaged in monitoring their driving are less risky drivers, and having a pediatrician deliver a brief intervention that guides parents to an evidence-based, web-based program has the potential to reach many families and to greatly enhance teen driver safety, she added.
This study was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.