ThinkFirst teams with National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for the Boost'em Up project

September, 2003

The ThinkFirst National Injury Prevention Foundation, a national, non-profit organization dedicated to the prevention of head and spinal cord injuries in children, has received an $800,000 government award. The US Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) chose ThinkFirst as the most highly qualified national organization to partner with them in conducting a 3-year demonstration project to increase booster seat usage among 4 to 8 year-old children.

This demonstration program, aptly title "Boost 'em Up!" will test a variety of interventions and strategies to identify which ones have the most promise for stimulating an increase in booster seat use at the local level. Interventions will be tested and refined over a three-year period in four ThinkFirst affiliate sites. Those locations are:

• Wilmington, Delaware: Virginia Corrigan at Christiana Trauma Care Hospital
• San Diego, California: Shelly Atkinson at Sharp HealthCare System
• Greater Chicago, Illinois: Debby Gerhardstein at Central Du Page Hospital
• Charleston, South Carolina: Bonnie Muntz-Pope at Medical University of South Carolina

The program includes the development of a tool to directly observe booster seat use; periodic observations of child safety seat and booster seat use; and an assessment of the impact of the various interventions on the incidence of child crash-related injuries through the examination and comparison over time of data collected and maintained by emergency medical service providers and local hospitals.