Are child passenger fatalities and child passenger severe injuries equally affected by child restraint legislation? The case of Chile

Abstract

The objective of this study is to determine the contribution of Chile's 2005 child restraint legislation to the reduction of child passenger fatalities and severe injuries. We analysed motor vehicle injury and fatality data from Chile's National Road Safety Commission of the Ministry of Transport from 2000 to 2012 to determine the effect of Chile's 2005 mandatory child restraint legislation. Using interrupted time-series Poisson regression models, we assessed the effect of the law on two dependent variables: (1) number of child fatalities in car and (2) number of children severely injured. The independent variable was the 2005 enactment of Chile's mandatory child restraint legislation. Coefficients from the interrupted time-series Poisson regression models indicate that Chile's enactment of child restraint legislation in 2005 is significantly associated with a total of 35% reduction in child passenger severely injured but only three years after its enactment, and significant associations between this policy and child fatalities were less evident.

Keywords:

• Child restraint legislation
• injury
• mortality
• Chile
• child safety

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion. We believed their insights and suggestions allowed us to improve this paper vastly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This unique data-set is available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

Global Health Steinberg Postdoctoral Fellowship [grant number 2016-2018]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 756-2016-0632].