Injury Center Blog
Posted by: George Lithco, Wednesday, May 21, 2008 03:12 pm ET

I am pleased to see that the Injury Center will be initiating a blog to solicit ideas on how it can do its work better.  I hope part of the conversation that ensues will be focus on three issues that do not seem to preoccupy prevention thinking:

1.  Telling Ain't Teaching: the heading was taken from a workshop for educators, but points to two basic problems in prevention education. 

Individuals trained in medicine generally lack training in effective communication and education skills.  The prevailing medical perspective focuses largely on expertise in diagnosis and treatment of the consequences of "bad" behaviors - what might be considered prevention failures, not expertise in educating individuals in ways that change behaviors.

The typical everyday prevention campaign does not focus on changing behavior: the goal is usually just to get information to people.  While that is obviously a necessary first step, there is ample evidence to show that it is not sufficient.

The prevention community needs to demand campaigns that work, and that means educating the community about the fundamental skill sets and techniques that make marketing and education effective.   I hope you will bring folks like the architects of the VERB campaign, but folks from the world of marketing.

Once the prevention community understands the tools and techniques that have been so enormously successful at selling, say, cigarettes, why not adapt and use them to prevent smoking?

2.  Teachable moments.  In a time of economic constraints, effective prevention programs must identify and exploit teachable moments to change behavior.  There is evidence that birth and other significant life changes are optimal times to educate. 

Birth is an especially opportune time not just because new parents are searching for information and support, but because the behaviors of parents and child in the first five years of life will either create sound preventive foundations for a lifetime or create patterns of dysfunctional behavior that will have significant social and economic repercussions for that same lifetime.  The opportunities seem enormous, yet the social investment in fundamental education and support activities for new parents and child is insignificant.

3.   Creating and Marketing Sustainable Prevention Initiatives.  One part of that challenge is to build public-private partnerships that will create the public policy foundation and economic rationale for investment in early childhood education and parenting skills, then communicate those opportunities to parents and their community support networks.

Another is creating sustainable programs.  That means leveraging the the desire of parents to keep their child safe, the desire of communities to maximize opportunities for parents and children to acquire and use skills that will make the work of social and economic institutions - including the schools, police and health care organizations - easier and more efficient, and the desire of business to meet the needs of parents and children.  If prevention is ever to work, it is essential to make the move from grant funding to investment based on social profits.  We can't afford not to pay for prevention, because we're already paying the cost of not preventing a host of preventable ills

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