Home-Based Practices For Preventing Childhood Burns In The New Juaben Municipality Of Ghana

This study explored the preventive practices among parents / caretakers of children in the New Juaben Municipality of Ghana with the aim of determining the effectiveness of such practices for the sake of providing interventions to reduce the occurrence of such injuries. The cross-sectional descriptive design which employed the quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection was used. Simple random sampling was used to select 600 parents/caretakers from 12 out of the 52 communities in the New Juaben Municipality. It was found that covariates such as not leaving children alone at home (OR 3.216, 95% CI 1.813 to 5.704), keeping matches / lighter out of reach of children (OR 2.806, 95% CI .039 to .160), preventing children from playing at the kitchen (OR 1.806, 95% CI 1.060 to 4.981) and educating children not to play with fire/lighter/matches (OR 1.278, 95% CI .0970 to 3.052) were found to be significant in preventing childhood burns while educating mothers on fire safety practices at home (OR .864, 95% CI .380 to 1.964) was not significant in preventing childhood burns.There is therefore the need for all stakeholders in child protection and welfare to collaborate in designing home-specific safety education campaign targeting the various age groups of children and parents with different socio – demographic backgrounds.