Investigation of factors influencing submarining mitigation with child booster seats.

Objective: Automobile booster seats are intended to improve belt fit for children that are too large for a harness-style child restraint, but not yet big enough to fit properly in an adult seat belt. Our objective was to prospectively study the relationship between booster seat design and interaction with the seat belt (specifically, submarining risk) for a child occupant using computer simulation of automobile crash events.

Methods: Frontal-impact simulations were performed with a 6-year-old child human body model.

Factors contributing to serious and fatal injuries in belted rear seat occupants in frontal crashes.

Earlier research has shown that the rear row is safer for occupants in crashes than the front row, but there is evidence that improvements in front seat occupant protection in more recent vehicle model years have reduced the safety advantage of the rear seat versus the front seat. The study objective was to identify factors that contribute to serious and fatal injuries in belted rear seat occupants in frontal crashes in newer model year vehicles. A case series review of belted rear seat occupants who were seriously injured or killed in frontal crashes was conducted.

IIHS head restraint ratings and insurance injury claim rates.

Objectives: The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) rates front seat/head restraint designs using a combination of static and dynamic measurements following RCAR-IIWPG procedures. The purpose of this study was to determine whether vehicles with better IIHS-rated seats/head restraints had lower injury risk in rear-end collisions and how the effect of better rated seats interacted with driver gender and age.

Methods: The presence of an associated insurance injury claim was determined for rear-impact crashes using 2001-2014 model year cars and SUVs.

"Do they think I am a pack rat?".

This case study presents details of the life of one older man who lived in seclusion and squalor, surrounded by hoarded possessions. This man was one participant of a focused ethnography of eight older adults who received home care. All participants in the original ethnography were identified by their community care coordinators as exhibiting hoarding behaviors.

Reasons to accumulate excess: older adults who hoard possessions.

This article is directed towards a deeper understanding of emotional issues that underpin hoarding behaviors by older people. A focused ethnographic research design was used as the method of exploration. The sample consisted of eight older adults who received home care and who were identified as exhibiting compulsive hoarding behaviors.

Bed rails. Is there an up side?

In 1995, the United States Food and Drug Administration reported 68 deaths, 22 injuries and 12 entrapments related to the use of side rails. How is it that a seemingly innocuous bed feature, touted for its safety and care assistive properties, has turned into a killer? This article describes how nurses, in an effort to assure the public of safe nursing practice, historically embraced a legally defined consensual understanding of bed rail use rather than one defined by science and research. The result was that bed rails continued to be viewed by practising nurses as a benevolent means of patient protection.