Thank you for the opportunity to speak today and to share Safe Kids Canada's views on injury prevention, focusing on our area of expertise: children and youth. We're extremely pleased to see that the committee on health is undertaking a study on this important public health issue.
Our vision is fewer injuries, healthier children, a safer Canada. Our mandate is to lead and inspire a culture of safety through the implementation of evidence-based strategies, healthy public policy, and education.
In Canada, unintentional injury remains the leading cause of death among children ages one to 14, more than any other cause. The top causes of death for Canadian children and youth are largely preventable. These include motor vehicle crashes, threats to breathing, drowning, pedestrian injuries, poisoning, falls, and a multitude of injuries in homes.
The numbers are revealing. In 2004, the latest year for which this information is available, unintentional injuries for all ages cost Canada's health care system approximately $19.8 billion in direct system and in direct costs annually. Approximately $4 billion are specifically related to unintentional injuries in children and youth.
On average, the equivalent of one classroom per month of children aged 14 and under are killed in Canada each year, another 60 are hospitalized for serious injury each day, and hundreds of thousands are seen in emergency departments every year.
The prevalence of injuries in Canada is alarming, and this number is staggering, yet consider that many experts believe that these numbers significantly underreport the true burden. Some estimate that five to ten times that number of children and youth suffer severe trauma and preventable injuries every year.
Injuries are not acts of fate or accidents. They do not have to happen. The majority of injuries are predictable and preventable. Bumps and scrapes may be a part of childhood, but serious injury resulting in death or lifelong disability is something that no child and their family should have to bear. Many of those who survive serious injury are left with disabilities, both physical and emotional. This stress on the child and their family and the community cannot be underestimated. Lost time at school for children and at work for their parents is just the tip of the iceberg.
In 2007 the World Health Organization strongly recommended its member countries develop and implement national injury prevention strategies. Canada can become an international leader in injury prevention. On March 3, 2010, in the Speech from the Throne, then Governor General Michaëlle Jean read the following statement:
To prevent accidents that harm our children and youth, our Government will also work in partnership with non-governmental organizations to launch a national strategy on childhood injury prevention.
Safe Kids Canada issued a media release encouraging this commitment to strategic action. This announcement was an important first step for the Government of Canada, and it lays the critical foundation for achieving progress in one of the most pressing health issues faced by our country, but more action is needed.
Health professionals, researchers, private sector leaders, not-for-profit organizations, and Canadian families have long awaited a coordinated approach that mobilizes their collective experience and knowledge to prevent the devastating lifelong changes that injuries place on children every day in this country.
In order to accomplish a substantial reduction in preventable injuries and loss of life due to injury among Canadian children and youth, Safe Kids Canada calls for the establishment of a national injury prevention strategy, a strategy that must include surveillance, measurement, leadership, adoption of healthy public policy, educational activities, and environmental changes.
The public health network's injury prevention and control task group, of which we are a member, developed a vision statement to frame and guide its work, which included the following: we see a Canada where injury is understood to be predictable and preventable, where governments, business leaders, and academics work together to ensure healthy public policy, enhance community capacity, support individual skills, and take all appropriate action to reduce the likelihood of injury and death; we see a Canada where an injury-causing event, when one occurs, is not dismissed as fate but seen as an important opportunity to learn, where important new knowledge and best practices for prevention are generated and translated into effective action; we see a Canada that enjoys the lowest rates of injury of any nation in the world.
Canada's children and youth do not enjoy the health that Canada is capable of providing. Injury is not seen as an indicator of child health, as it should be. Comparative data with other countries suggest that market improvement is both achievable and necessary. Canada ranks 18th out of 26 international OECD countries in terms of injury and mortality for children and youth. There's an urgent need for a strategic approach to injury prevention in Canada.
I will conclude with one final thought from a recent report issued by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In Canada there are more than five million women of child-bearing age, and their children will add to the eight million children and youth in Canada who represent the future of our country. An implemented national strategy can keep the future of Canada safe.
Thank you.