Child Passenger Safety Specialist Certification
From Spring 1997Volume IV, Number 1
A special course available soon from NHTSA will establish a new level of credibility for child passenger safety specialists.
NHTSA's Office of Communications and Outreach is working with partners from various national organizations--including the National SAFE KIDS Campaign, the American Automobile Association, the National Safety Council, the National Seat Belt Coalition, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and the Emergency Nurses Association--to develop a certification process for individuals who teach child occupant protection to the public. The goal is to develop a standardized technical curriculum and infrastructure for providing the course to professionals nationwide.
The four-day course includes lectures, discussion, role playing, and hands-on sessions. It is targeted both to novices who wish to become trained as technicians and to experienced instructors who wish to be certified to teach the course to others.
Deborah Davis Stewart, an expert in child restraint issues and the editor of Safe Ride News, has worked with representatives from NHTSA, state highway safety offices, and a number of national organizations to draft the curriculum for the course. The curriculum provides the information necessary to deal with complex issues of child occupant protection, including:
To ensure that states and localities have the capacity to provide ongoing training to specialists, certification will be available at three levels:
"We want to be sure that in every state, if not in every community, we have child passenger safety specialists who are technicians, trainers, and master trainers," said Cheryl Neverman, a highway safety specialist at NHTSA's Office of Communications and Outreach. "We will work with our national partners to help train their members across the country."
NHTSA and other occupant restraint experts have been teaching child passenger safety technical courses for years and have trained specialists across the country to train others in the field. However, until now there has been no standard, written curriculum that could be used to ensure that child passenger safety specialists were being trained using approved materials and a uniform set of instructions.
Hospitals and other service providers are increasingly aware of their potential liability for communicating incorrect--and potentially deadly--information to parents. This potential liability has been made very real by an ongoing lawsuit against a Pennsylvania hospital and its staff who showed an outdated child restraint video to the parents of a newborn. Following the instructions given in this 10-year-old video, the parents placed the infant in a rear-facing safety seat in the front seat of the car. The child was killed when the passenger-side frontal air bag deployed in a collision. The recent documentation of the dangers of air bags to improperly restrained children has also raised concern about the use of approved materials.
"This process of certification will help significantly with hospitals, clinics, and other organizations that are concerned about liability issues and want to document that their staff have been certified through a training using a national, standardized curriculum," said Neverman.
The draft curriculum is currently being revised based on feedback from pilot trainings held in April 1997 in Fairfax, Virginia, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. NHTSA is still working with its partners to finalize the scheduling and delivery of these trainings. Eventually, the trainings will be offered regularly through local chapters of national health and safety organizations, including the partners listed above. If you are interested in setting up a training and are a member of one of these national organizations, contact that organization. If you are not a member of one of these organizations, contact Carole Guzzetta, director, National Safety Belt Coalition, at (202) 296-6263, fax (202) 293-0032, e-mail guzzettc@nsc.org.
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Revised: June 24, 1997
