A voluntary professional organization, the CPS represents more than 2,700 pediatricians, pediatric subspecialists, pediatric residents, and other people who work with and care for children and youth.
We are governed by an elected board of directors representing each province and territory. CPS members are committed to working together to advance the health and well-being of children and youth by nurturing excellence in health care, advocacy--which is why I am here today--education, research, and support of its membership.
We accomplish this mission in three ways. First, professional education ensures that those who care for children and youth have access to evidence-based research and clinical guidelines to provide the highest quality of health care to children and youth in Canada. Specifically around injury prevention, just to show you our dedication to this issue, at our upcoming annual conference to be held here in late June--and you're all welcome to come--we have at least two sessions on preventing injury, including one specifically concentrating on product safety for children under five. Pediatricians want to know what they can do to protect kids.
Second, we accomplish our mission through public education, providing parents and other caregivers with up-to-date information on disease prevention, health promotion, and injury prevention to support them in caring for their children and youth. Our parent website, Caring for Kids, for example, has over 150,000 visits per month. We also have an electronic parent newsletter, as well as a Facebook page. And as I will say later in my presentation, we would look forward to working with Health Canada and the Government of Canada to get the word out to both health care professionals and parents about Bill C-6.
Last, we accomplish our mission through advocacy. We want to work with governments to support legislative programs that protect children and youth from harm and promote healthy development. We are very active on the injury prevention front, especially at the provincial and territorial level. Injury prevention has been central to the mission of the Canadian Paediatric Society since its inception in 1922. However, even though many of us--CPS and Safe Kids, to name two--have been advocating for a national approach to prevent injury, we have a long way to go. As many of you know, the recent World Health Organization report entitled World report on child injury prevention gives a very disturbing picture of how many children and youth die needlessly or are injured every year. And this is something that is 100% preventable.
While Canada has made significant strides in reducing unintentional childhood mortalities and injury in recent years, we should not be smug about our progress, as the OECD still ranks us a dismal 22nd out of 29 developed countries in the prevention of such injury. We need to do more as a nation.
Therefore, the Canadian Paediatric Society welcomes the introduction of Bill C-6, as we strongly believe it will protect children and youth from injury. As just stated, we have long advocated for a Canadian injury prevention strategy. While Bill C-6 does not answer all the needs that would be met through the establishment of such a strategy--so we will continue to advocate for it--it is a vital component of what we envisioned: the federal government taking a leadership role within its powers to protect Canada's youngest citizens.
Perhaps one of the most useful roles I can play today is to tell you what the Canadian Paediatric Society has learned about product safety over the past few years. We have a joint program with the Public Health Agency of Canada, named the Canadian pediatric surveillance program, where every month we ask every pediatrician in Canada whether they have seen a child with a rare childhood condition or injury. In the last five years we have had the opportunity to study three injuries caused by commonly used infant products: wheeled baby walkers, which thankfully are now banned; infant bath seats; and magnets in toys.
So what did we learn? In light of the time available, I'm just going to speak about baby walkers and magnets today.
In the case of baby walkers, which we looked at in 2002, a voluntary ban had been in place for years on wheeled baby walkers, but children were still suffering injuries. We asked every pediatrician if they had seen an injury caused by a baby walker within the last 12 months. Eighty-four pediatricians had reported seeing a child with an injury they could remember, so it was serious enough that they could remember it. They reported seeing a total of 132 injured kids. Given that there is absolutely no development benefit to infants from wheeled baby walkers, one really must ask oneself, why did the product continue to be available in Canada?
When Health Canada righty initiated the process for a complete ban, one of the importers objected. This led to a long and costly review process, not only for government but the actual health care professionals who took their time to prepare for the hearings and to give up a day of clinical care to come to Ottawa and present. And at the actual hearings, the company that had asked for a review actually did not even bother to appear. So all of the witnesses in front of the review panel were organizations, like the Canadian Paediatric Society, that agreed with the complete ban.
What we would look forward to is the inclusion of the new general prohibition in Bill C-6, so the Minister of Health can now quickly act to remove dangerous products from the marketplace.
Turning to magnets ingested by children, when the CPS first started to hear from our members about their concern regarding the ingestion of small magnets, we were able to work with both Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada to determine what pediatricians were seeing in their practices. Thirty-nine of the respondents to our survey were not even aware of the risk to children and youth--well, hopefully youth aren't swallowing them--from the magnets. There were 19 reported cases where children had swallowed the magnets, including a case of a perforated bowel, which is a very serious medical condition.
The information collected through this survey allowed us to better inform health care providers and the public about the risk of these toys and completely complemented the work of Health Canada and their risk communication efforts.
For CPS, one of the advantages of Bill C-6 is the mandatory reporting provision by the manufacturers. As Health Canada learns of risk associated with products used by children and youth, we can work together with them and with partners, such as Safe Kids, to get the word out quickly to health care providers and, through them, to the parents they serve.
Pediatricians are very committed to something we call anticipatory guidance--providing parents with the information they need to do the best they can. A large portion of the anticipatory guidance we encourage our member to do is around injury prevention. The more information child and youth health professionals have that they can share with families or that we can include in our public education pamphlets and handouts and on our web, the better. By providing very current evidence-based information, we can protect our kids from senseless injury.
Allow me to share with you another incident that occurred during the last six years. It demonstrates the importance of Bill C-6, specifically clauses 9 and 10.
As I'm sure you are aware, the CPS recommends that babies sleep on their back. We discovered that a product was being sold at a major Canadian retailer claiming to position the child for sleep in the position recommended by the Canadian Paediatric Society. The problem with that is that if you actually go and read our statement on safe sleep, it specifically says there is no need for any product or cushions to keep the baby on his or her back. In fact, we state that the crib should be free of all pillows, toys, etc.
At that point in time, we had little recourse to change the packaging, other than to file a complaint with the company, inform the retailer of the misleading claim, and then hope they would listen to us. With the new provision in Bill C-6, we can contact Health Canada, people with whom we share our value of protecting children and youth, and allow them to work with us to ensure that products are not being marketed to parents under false pretense.
In closing, we would like to urge that Bill C-6 be passed into law as soon as possible. The Canadian Paediatric Society looks forward to working with Health Canada to inform physicians of the new legislation to encourage them to actively report incidents due to a consumer product. Now there will be even more incentive for them to do so, because they will feel that something can happen quickly to protect the kids they serve. We look forward to using our channels to inform and educate parents of the enhancements to the safety of products intended for use by their children and youth.
I would also hope that as part of the action plan, as it's considered and finalized, there are funds to support Canadian surveillance to examine product safety for children and youth, as well as funds to support parents to obtain replacements for recalled essential equipment, such as cribs. We would hate to have a parent respond immediately to the recall and then put their child in an unsafe sleeping position. So we need to make sure we support parents in that way.
Thank you. Merci.