Improving child safety in car
Car seats should be mandatory for children. Maxi-Cosi is at the forefront of the campaign to educate parents. It bears repetition. Car crashes kill more children than any other injury. Car seats, booster seats and seat belts, when used correctly, play an important role in keeping children safe and sound while travelling. “There are several different types of car seats available and each is designed for a specific purpose,” says Ben Boenk, CEO of DutchKid, exclusive distributor of Maxi-Cosi car seats in the GCC. “Knowing a child’s height and weight before purchasing a car seat is important. It is essential that car seats, booster seats and seat belts are used properly.”
The law does not yet require that all newborns and infants use a rear-facing car seat. But it may soon be mandated, and until then Maxi-Cosi is working in conjunction with the various health authorities, hospitals and other organisations to help mitigate the situation. “We take a sensible commercial approach that also benefits the community,” says Boenk. “We came up with the idea to bring the stakeholders together – hospitals, health authorities and corporate sponsors.”
The first initiative for this experiment was in Abu Dhabi together with Daman health insurance company. “We conducted a study together with the health authorities in Abu Dhabi, which showed that giving each child a car seat is 30 times cheaper than not giving it, in terms of expenses health care authorities will incur,” says Boenk. “The study also showed that if you wanted to hand out car safety seats to all the newborns in the UAE, it would cost around Dh50 million a year. That includes the price of the seat plus the marketing and logistics costs. Whereas the costs related to health care are 30 times that amount.”
This convinced Maxi-Cosi that it would make sense to distribute free car seats to newborns. “We realised there is a big step to be taken to reach acceptable levels of safety for children in cars,” says Boenk. “Of course, we feel it should be 100 per cent, but we are willing to try for 75 per cent for a start. It should be 100 per cent for newborns as they are totally helpless.”
To decide the best way of implementing the project, Maxi-Cosi conducted further research. “We interviewed many parents as to why they don’t use child safety seats and came up against several arguments: price, lack of awareness, and more often, ‘my child doesn’t want to be in a child safety seat!’” says Boenk. “Based on the data collected, we decided that the parents with newborn babies would be the easiest to persuade. The mother is in an emotional state, so is the father and it is easy to influence them at this stage. Also in there can be a push from the hospitals.”
One of the problems they encountered was that most parents had not been in car seats themselves as children, and hence did not realise the importance of using them.
Hospitals were very keen to join the crusade. “They take a lot of effort bringing these babies into the world, they hate seeing them drive away unsafe in the laps of their parents,” says Boenk.
Based on the research, Maxi-Cosi together with the other stakeholders decided to target parents of newborn babies through the hospitals, ensuring that babies would be taken home in a car seat when released from hospitals. “This is a common rule in Europe, Canada, Australia and the US – you cannot take your babies out of the hospital unless they are in a car seat,” says Boenk. “We thought it would be great if hospitals could make parents do it before the rule is made mandatory.”
To offset the cost of distributing free car seats, Maxi-Cosi decided to partner with Daman in the project. The Corniche Hospital in Abu Dhabi was selected “because it is the largest hospital in the UAE – one out of seven babies born in the UAE is in that hospital,” says Boenk. “The idea was to give away a car seat to each and every baby born there.” That settled the argument of cost.
It was not enough to just give away car seats. Parents had to be trained to use them properly. “We trained nurses in this hospital – which was later extended to other hospitals as well – so they could in turn train parents,” says Boenk. “We set up a dummy car seat that could be wheeled into the room so that demonstrations could be held right in front of the parents.”
For Maxi-Cosi, the fight has just begun. “We take this very seriously, we talk to hospitals and parents, we’ve set up a website, childsafety.ae, to communicate directly with people,” explains Boenk. “We have a huge database of facebook fans who communicate with us on child safety aspects. We do a lot of training, we’ve just opened a car seat training centre in our Dubai premises in Matloob building on Sheikh Zayed Road, near the Safa Park exit.”
Maxi-Cosi has also sponsored a personnel training centre in Abu Dhabi that has been operating for about a year now.
In addition to this Maxi-Cosi, through the JustKidding store, offers trade-ins for old car seats that have to be replaced as the child grows up. “We have trade-in offers for people who want to exchange the free seats they receive when their child grows up – they get a discount on the next one. When the child grows out of the seat between nine and 12 months, we send an SMS to parents about the imminent change of car seat for their child.”
The Dubai Health Authority is looking to launch a new initiative, and “we are going to actively operate our training centre here. We are going to have a demo model at our store that people can drive in and check out how to operate them, and other safety aspects, to see if their car seats are correctly fitted.”
Maxi-Cosi, together with General Motors, plans to train school and nursery staff, police and health workers in car seat safety aspects. “It is very important that they, especially the nursery staff, know how to correctly fit a child seat for they are in a position to advise parents on the correct way a child should travel in a car,” says Boenk. “We also trained 250 cadets from the Sharjah Police Academy so that they are also aware of the situation.”
Abu Dhabi will launch a new campaign that we’ll participate in, likewise the Sharjah Ladies Club is very active with their child safety campaign and we conduct training sessions for them.”
Hopefully, the future will be safer for children.
