Introduction Children from ages one to three are frequent victims of poisonings caused by household products, personal care products, plants, and medications. Parents are often not familiar with all the poisons in the home, how to maintain a poison safe home, how to handle poison emergencies, and the role of the Poison Center as a community resource for the prevention and the treatment of poison emergencies. The Need for Community Poison Prevention Education Research has shown that calling the Poison Center for information is cost-effective because it reduces unnecessary visits to the hospital emergency room.
Further findings reveal that most poisonings involving children can be safely handled in the home.
Unfortunately, Poison Centers are underutilized by the communities they serve. Mothers in these groups express low self-efficacy with regard to carrying out the instructions from the poison center. The Southern Poison Center of the University of Tennessee provides information on poisons and assistance in poisoning emergencies through a 24-hour hotline. Specially trained pharmacists respond to each call with a computerized poison information system and on-call consultants. The Southern Poison Center managed a total of 292,294 cases in 1998.