# Presentation: 128117

## Home Safety Literacy Project

**Angela D. Mickalide, Ph.D, CHES**
**Director of Education and Outreach, Home Safety Council**
**National Prevention Summit**
**Washington, DC**
**October 27, 2006**

## Home Safety Council

- 	The Home Safety Council (HSC) is the only national non-profit organization solely dedicated to preventing home related injuries that result in nearly 20,000 deaths and 21 million medical visits on average each year. Through national programs, partnerships and the support of volunteers, HSC educates people of all ages to be safer in and around their homes.

## Research Foundations 

## Home Safety Research

- Each year, preventable injuries in the home:
- Result in nearly 20,000 deaths
- Cause nearly 21 million medical visits
- Are the fifth leading cause of death overall
- Are 2.5 times more likely to cause injury than car crashes
- Cost our nation up to $380 billion
- Cost employers up to $38 billion
- Commissioned by the Home Safety Council and conducted by the
- University of North Carolina’s Injury and Prevention Research
- Center

- Conducted the largest and most comprehensive study of injuries at home –
- the *State of Home Safety in AmericaTM*

## Home Safety Research

- State of Home Safety in AmericaTM

-   Leading causes of home injury death
- Falls
- Poisoning
- Fires / Burns
- Choking
- Drowning

## Community Outreach

## The Great Safety Adventure

- 	The Great Safety Adventure® (GSA) is in its eighth year of teaching the importance of home safety to children across the nation. The program has reached nearly ***one million*** participants!

- 	GSA continues to be a favorite among elementary schools and Lowe’s stores.

## GSA Highlights

_**2006**_
- 2006 YTD attendance: 61,325
- 25 classes taught in Spanish
- 188 events in 16 markets
- 120 elementary school visits
- 42 Lowe’s store events
- 26 special event days
- 16.46 million media impressions
- 1,762 media placements
- 698 Spanish media placements

_**2005**_
- 2005 attendance: 139,169
- 58 classes taught in Spanish
- 362 events in 32 markets
- 179 elementary school visits
- 77 Lowe’s store visits
- 104 special event days
- 41.5 million media impressions
- 1,327 media placements
- 367 Spanish media placements

** **

_**Great Safety Adventure Curriculum Kit**_
- Includes the “Code Red Rover” video along with printed safety materials for schools and communities where the Great Safety Adventure was requested but unable to visit.
- Reach: 1,880 schools and/or public health departments reaching 101,000+ children

## Youth Safety Outreach 

_**2005 Safety Ranger Program**_
**“****Safety Rangers Say No to Dangers”** and **“Code Red Rover, Grownup Come Over and video.**
- Addresses the top five home injury risks for children: falls, fires/burns, poisonings, choking/suffocation and drowning.
- Reach: 131,223 teachers (print) and
- 95,000 teachers and parents (video)

## Youth Safety Outreach

_**2006 Safety Ranger Program**_
***Disaster Preparedness Outreach***
- "**Get Ready with Freddie"** poster guide focuses on creating an emergency preparedness plan and “Ready-to-Go” and “Ready-to-Stay” kits.
- Reach: 65,000 3rd and 4th grade teachers and 3,700 Expert Network members (6.7 million people)
- Impact:  50% of teachers reported that their students made changes in family readiness

## Youth Safety Outreach

_**2006 Safety Ranger Program**_
***Disaster Preparedness Outreach***
- NEW 8-page “**Get Ready with Freddie”** activity book and video sent in August 2006 to schools which did not receive the January 2006 poster guide.
- Reach: 13,000 3rd & 4th grade teachers (1.4 million people); Operation Freddie fund-raising underway to deliver program to every school in the United States in January 2007.

## Youth Safety Outreach

_**2006 Disaster Preparedness Program**_
***Lowe’s Store Outreach Initiative***
- HSC distributed 64,000 copies of the **“Get Ready with Freddie”** DVD through Lowe’s “Build and Grow” clinics on Saturday, October 7, 2006.

** **

- Falls are the #1 cause of home injury deaths, especially for adults 65+.
- Promotes home modifications, medication tracking and physical activity
- Includes an educational video, wall poster and falls prevention activities
- Three-year study to evaluate effectiveness being conducted by UNC through CDC grant
- Reach: 11,000 older adult activity            centers

## Home Safety Literacy Project

##                What Is Literacy?

-    Using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.
- 		--*National Assessment of Adult Literacy*

## Why Does Health Literacy Matter?

-    Studies that have investigated the issue report that limited literacy skills are a stronger predictor of an individual's health status than age, income, employment status, education level, and racial or ethnic group.
*Partnership for Clear Health Communications*

## Background

- Adults with low literacy are considered at high-risk from fires as a result of several factors, including:
- Their inability to read and understand current English-language community safety messages
- Inability to read or comprehend product information, including instructions for using smoke alarms
- Most of the fire safety material in use by fire departments nationally are written at the
- 	6th-11th grade reading level

**Notes:**
Low literacy presents a significant barrier to learning life-saving fire safety skills and to understanding how to properly use essential home fire protection equipment.
Just think about the written information and knowledge you use every day – from weather reports to prescription dosages; from children’s report cards to warning labels on poisonous products.  Imagine how different , and how difficult your day would be if you could not read.

## National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL)

- Conducted by U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics
- Released December 2005
- Interviewed 19,714 participants ages 16 or older in homes and prisons across the United States

## The Three Literacy Scales

*Prose literacy*:  understanding continuous text arranged in sentences and paragraphs (e.g., news stories, brochures)
*Document literacy*:  comprehending noncontinuous text in various formats (e.g., job applications, payroll forms, bus schedules, maps, tables, food and drug labels)
*Quantitative literacy*:  identifying and performing computations (e.g., checkbooks, order forms, interest
- 	on loans)

**Notes:**
The US Department of Education statistics estimates 90 Million American adults age 16 or older have low or limited reading skills. 
The 2000 US Census Bureau statistics indicate 1 in 5 Americans speak a language other than English.  
The number of poor households headed by immigrants increased 123% from 1979-1997, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
40 million of the 90 million adults have literacy levels that only allow them to:
Total an entry on a deposit slip
Locate the place and time of a meeting on a form
Identify a specific piece of information in a news paper article.

Low literacy is not always easy to detect but it is all around us.  These men and women are missing information that has an impact on their safety, health and well being including home fire prevention and protection basics.

In every community in America there are adults who cannot read, yet need access to safety information as much as readers do.  Without it, they cannot readily learn how to stay safe at home, where they are most vulnerable to unintentional injuries and fires.

##                     Literacy Levels Described in NAAL        

***Below basic*****—ranges from being nonliterate in English to being able to do only the most simple and concrete tasks such as signing a form, adding the amounts on a bank deposit slip, or reading a short text to find out what a patent is allowed to drink before a medical test. **
***Basic*****—ability to perform simple and everyday literacy activities such as using a TV guide to find out what programs are on at a specific time, comparing the ticket prices for two events, searching a pamphlet for prospective jurors to find out how people were selected for the jury pool.**
***Intermediate*****—ability to perform moderately challenging literacy activities such as identifying a specific location on a map, consulting reference materials to determine which foods contain a particular vitamin, or calculating the total cost of ordering specific office supplies from a catalog**
***Proficient*****—ability to perform more complex and challenging literacy**
**	****activities such as comparing viewpoints in two editorials;**
**	****interpreting a table about blood pressure, age, and physical**
**	****activity; and computing and comparing the cost per ounce **
**	****of food items**

## Key Findings

- 14% of the population (30 million adults) function at the lowest or *Below Basic* level on prose tasks
- 29% of the population (63 million adults) function at the second or *Basic* level on prose tasks
- 55% of the population (118 million adults) have only *Basic* or *Below Basic* quantitative skills

##     Risk Factors for Limited Literacy   

- Low income
- Unemployed
- Elderly
- Did not finish high school
- Minority ethnic group
- Recent immigrant to United States who does
- 	not speak English
- Born in the United States but English is
- 	second language

## Adult Safety Outreach

_***2005-2006 Home Safety Literacy Project***_
- HSC has established partnerships with ProLiteracy Worldwide and Oklahoma State University’s Fire Protection Publications to research and develop new easy-to-read fire safety and disaster preparedness information for adults enrolled in literacy programs.
- Reach: 9,000 (Phase I) and 15,000 (Phase II) adult literacy teachers and Expert Network members

**Notes:**
The US Department of Education statistics estimates 90 Million American adults age 16 or older have low or limited reading skills. 
The 2000 US Census Bureau statistics indicate 1 in 5 Americans speak a language other than English.  
The number of poor households headed by immigrants increased 123% from 1979-1997, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
40 million of the 90 million adults have literacy levels that only allow them to:
Total an entry on a deposit slip
Locate the place and time of a meeting on a form
Identify a specific piece of information in a news paper article.

Low literacy is not always easy to detect but it is all around us.  These men and women are missing information that has an impact on their safety, health and well being including home fire prevention and protection basics.

In every community in America there are adults who cannot read, yet need access to safety information as much as readers do.  Without it, they cannot readily learn how to stay safe at home, where they are most vulnerable to unintentional injuries and fires.

## Home Safety Literacy Project Objectives

- Provide high-quality, tested fire education instruction
- Provide deliberate and effective outreach
- Pair fire and literacy experts at the community level
- Ensure little or no impact on fire service or literacy provider budget or staffing

**Notes:**
Objective High quality tested fire education Instruction
The Home Safety Council’s National Fire Safety Project is the first tested national initiative designed to reach adults who have difficulty reading with the facts they need to protect themselves and their families form home fires.  The instructional materials are designed to meet the high standards of both the national literacy community and the fire services.  
The materials are imbedded with heavy illustration and simple English to ensure  delivery into literacy curricula is seamless.  
The materials boost fire and life safety educators’ efforts to reach high-risk fire groups in their communities

The Project serves the large and growing population of immigrants and other adult non-readers by creating and providing basic home fire safety information in a format that people with low literacy can understand.

The Project is a systematic community education program that intentionally and concurrently targets those with low literacy skills.  That it uniquely and directly reaches household care givers of young children and older adults is and advantage.   And that’s no accident.  Nearly 70% of Pro Literacy students in the US are between the ages of 25 and 59, which puts them squarely in the caregiver group, typically responsible for assisting very young and older family members.

Objective: Provide Deliberate and Effective Outreach
To address the significant and compounding  barrier low literacy presents to learning and applying fire safety, the HSC established an unprecedented partnership with Pro Literacy Worldwide and OSU’s Fire Protection Publications to develop and delivery a deliberate and effective method to introduce fire safety to adult students enrolled in literacy programs.

Those at highest risk are often hardest to reach.  Fire and burns are the third-leading cause of unintentional home injury death in the United States.  Each year tens of thousands of people are hurt by fire and burns and more than 3400 die as a result of these needless preventable injuries.

The sobering reality for the fire service is that those at highest fire risk are often hardest to reach. To be inclusive and effective in their outreach, fire and life safety educators need inexpensive yet innovate approaches and proven tools that provide reliable, comprehensible and relevant fire safety education. 

Objective: Pairs fire and literacy Experts at the Community Level
This unique approach pairs fire and literacy experts at the community level in a community public education team. The Fire Safety Literacy Project materials boost fire and life safety educator's efforts to reach high-fire-risk groups in their communities.  Literacy providers welcome the opportunity to embed real-life safety messages into their lessons because it improves the overall value students gain from literacy instruction.

Ensures little or no Impact on FS or Literacy Provider budgets or Staffing
Best of all, the program is an enhancement to the work they are each already doing and the materials are provided to literacy programs the US fire departments by the Home Safety Council at no charge.

## Pilot Tests

- Seven urban and rural areas of the U.S. conducted a pilot test of the Home Safety Literacy Project:
-  San Bernardino, CA
-  Washington, DC
-  Palm Beach, FL
-  Montgomery County, MD
-  Poteau, OK
-  Philadelphia, PA
-  Plano, TX

**Notes:**
The Project materials were tested in seven urban and rural sites in late 2004.
They were San Bernardino, CA; Washington DC; Palm Beach, FL; Montgomery County, MD; Philadelphia, PA; Poteau, OK; and Plano, Texas

Note: MK. Julie why is WA state be highlighted on the map? Shouldn’t this be Oregon for Tualatin Valley? Or maybe not!

## Formative Evaluation Results

- Literacy providers and fire service members from the seven pilot sites were trained in 2004 to implement and evaluate the project’s instructional approach and specialized materials
- Results from pilot test were evaluated through an independent formative evaluation process immediately following the conclusion of the pilot/field test.
- Conclusion:  focus on a few key messages and develop different materials for various reading levels

**Notes:**
In late of September of 2004 teams from the seven sites representing a broad geographic range and demographic diversity representing both literacy and fire service professionals, both career and volunteers were brought together for an in service on field testing the materials.  The participants included literacy program managers, teachers/tutors, and coordinators in Fire Departments.

Time was provided during the training for the teams to develop a plan to implement the pilot project in their local communities.

## Home Safety Literacy Project Kit 

## 		HSLP Components

- Overview video and computer slide show
- Pictographs
- Readers – 2 levels
- Tabloid, “News for You”
- Posters
- Tearpads
- Pencils
- Community Leaders Guide
- Literacy Teachers Users Manual

##                  Key Messages

- Installing and maintaining smoke alarms
- Creating and practicing a home fire escape plan
- Developing a communications plan for disasters
- Assembling “Ready-to-Go” and “Ready-to-Stay kits

## Results

- 	_Fire Safety Teaching Aids_
- Technically accurate
- Meet national literacy standards
- Highly Illustrated
- Easy to read
- Meet stringent national fire safety standards
- _Content includes:_
- Home fire safety skills
- How to apply key fire protection measures in the home:
- Installing and maintaining adequate smoke alarm protection
- Emergency escape preparedness

**Notes:**
An average of 3,400 people in America die each year from preventable fires. 
The three major causes of these fires are men, women and children. Consider this it is not a cigarette that falls asleep while being smoked or a home that decides not to have a smoke alarm installed, it is people who cause the majority of preventable fires.
Fires and burns, choking/suffocation, and drowning are the leading causes of home injury death among children.

The Fire Safety Literacy Project is a systematic community education approach to reach those at highest risk. 

The focus of the Project is on installation of Smoke Alarms and Emergency Escape preparedness.  These two simple yet significant life saving behaviors will in effect reduce the needless loss of life to children and adults by as much as 60% much the same way the efforts to reach the general population in the late 1970’s to today were accomplished. By providing early detection and a plan of action should a fire occur.

## Summative Evaluation Sites

- Fifteen urban and rural areas of the U.S. were selected to help the Home Safety Council conduct a summative evaluation of the Home Safety Literacy Project.  An additional 15 communities served as control sites.  Experimental sites included:

-  Camp Verde, AZ
-  Dekalb County, GA
-  Wabash County, IN
-  Columbus, MS
-  Tunica, MS
-  Hickory, NC
-  Wilson, NC
-  Rochester, NY
-  Lima, OH
-  Chambersburg, PA
-  Westerly, RI
-  College Station, TX
-  Prince William County, VA
-  Tacoma, WA
-  Jamesville, WI

**Notes:**
MEDIA SUCCESSES FOR HSC IN 2004 ARE AS FOLLOWS:  (WALK HSC THROUGH BULLETS)

##   Summative Evaluation Results

- Adult students who participated in the *Home Safety Literacy Project ***learned more fire safety messages** than adult students who did not participate in the project.
- A greater number and percent of adult students who participated in the *Home Safety Literacy Project ***had smoke alarms installed** in their homes than adult students who did not participate in the project.
- A greater number and percent of adult students who
-        participated in the *Home Safety Literacy Project ***created **
**       ****fire escape plans **for their homes than adult students who
-        did not participate in the project.

##       Fire Department Challenges

- Overcoming student reluctance to have firefighters come into their homes,
- Communicating with non-English speaking populations,
- Developing a schedule to install smoke alarms in the homes of adult students within the timeframe of a firefighter’s work week, and
- Targeting an adult student population who actually needs smoke alarms installed in
-      their homes.

## Adult Safety Outreach

_***2006-2007 Reaching Those Who Teach Project***_
- HSC received $1 million from the DHS/FEMA for a third year of funding. Key components:
- Survey of fire safety education in partnership with Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
- New fire safety materials for preschoolers, elementary school students, middle schoolers, and older adults  through Weekly Reader
- Best practices in fire safety education conference in Washington, DC, January 10-12, 2007

**Notes:**
The US Department of Education statistics estimates 90 Million American adults age 16 or older have low or limited reading skills. 
The 2000 US Census Bureau statistics indicate 1 in 5 Americans speak a language other than English.  
The number of poor households headed by immigrants increased 123% from 1979-1997, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
40 million of the 90 million adults have literacy levels that only allow them to:
Total an entry on a deposit slip
Locate the place and time of a meeting on a form
Identify a specific piece of information in a news paper article.

Low literacy is not always easy to detect but it is all around us.  These men and women are missing information that has an impact on their safety, health and well being including home fire prevention and protection basics.

In every community in America there are adults who cannot read, yet need access to safety information as much as readers do.  Without it, they cannot readily learn how to stay safe at home, where they are most vulnerable to unintentional injuries and fires.

##        Home Safety Month 2006

- Salute to Home Safety Awards Dinner
- Media: 140+ million impressions
- Materials:  30,000+ via e-store, Expert Network, corporations, safety groups

- Theme: Hands on Home Safety
- Sub-theme: Light it up, lock it up, test it
- Omnibus poll older adult safety by Harris—*Safe Haven *report
- Web activity: 185% increase over 2005
- Webinar: 80 participants

## The Expert Network

- HSC established the Expert Network to provide fire and life safety educators with **reliable and effective home safety teaching tools.**

- Nearly 4,000 members – 90% from **local fire departments**.
- Additional educators include **nurses, public health educators, literacy teachers **and **community safety advocates.**

##    Public Policy Initiatives

**   ****Public Policy Initiatives**

** **

- Introduce and support health and safety legislation – *Keeping Seniors Safe from Falls Act of 2006 *with requested annual funding of $35 million
- Increase HSC’s visibility on Capitol Hill and acknowledge Congressional support for HSC’s mission – Leadership awards to Senators Burr and Specter and Representatives Davis and Andrews

## Public Policy Initiatives

- Partner with federal and non-governmental agencies – Affiliation with DHS’s Citizen Corps which reaches 72% of the US population
- Secure funding - $50,000 earmark for development of GSA curriculum kit through CDC
- Participate in targeted coalition efforts – Campaign for Public Health (495) and Falls Free Coalition (65+)

## Recent and Upcoming Safety Observances

- Home Security Week (July)
- Garage Safety Week (August)
- Falls Safety Month (September)
- National Preparedness Month (September)
- Fire Safety Month (October)
- Ladder Safety Week (November)

##  2006 Awards for Home Safety Council 

- Two Silver Anvil Awards from the Public Relations Society of America (Home Safety Month 2005 and BRG’s year-round media efforts)
- Institute for Health Literacy Award for Innovative Health Literacy Program (Home Safety Literacy Project)
- DC Chapter of the American Marketing Association (Great Safety Adventure)
- CFSI/Motorola Mason Lankford Fire Service Leadership Award (Meri-K Appy)
- Sprinkler Advocate of the Year (Meri-K Appy)

## Additional Information

- Angela Mickalide, Ph.D., CHES
- Director of Education and Outreach
- Home Safety Council
-  1250 Eye St., NW, Ste. 1000
- Washington, DC 20005
- 202-330-4907
- _[Angela.mickalide@homesafetycouncil.org](mailto:Angela.mickalide@homesafetycouncil.org)_
- _www.homesafetycouncil.org_

**Additional Information**