CDC’s Learning Connection website will feature NWCPHP’s course Safe at Every Stage: Injury and Violence Prevention and the Developing Brain throughout August.
Throughout August, NWCPHP’s online course Safe at Every Stage: Injury and Violence Prevention and the Developing Brain will be featured on the CDC Learning Connection, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s online resource of learning tools and opportunities for public health professionals, as well as in the corresponding e-newsletter. The CDC site has also previously featured four of NWCPHP’s other online courses.
The course addresses how injury risk changes at each stage of brain development from infancy to early adulthood. This online training also helps users identify how to find local data and combine it with developmental research, and how to incorporate such research and data when working with partners and communities to identify priorities and develop strategies for improving child and youth injury prevention efforts.
Released in January 2018, the course reflects a culmination of NWCPHP’s years of work focusing on injury and violence prevention—previously a key part of its work as the Northwest Regional Public Health Training Center, and now an ongoing training area—as well as NWCPHP’s development of leadership opportunities for maternal and child health professionals.
Risk factors for injury and fatality vary across age groups, as the course makes clear, but injury risk is high overall from infancy to early adulthood. “Injury causes more deaths in people under 25 than any other cause,” explained course instructor Karyn Brownson, MSW, Community Safety Manager, Violence and Injury Prevention, at Public Health – Seattle & King County. “But the limited resources available for prevention don’t meet the need. Brain development research gives us a tool to tailor prevention of child, youth, and young adult injuries to the developmental needs and strengths of the age groups most at risk.”
Safe at Every Stage is designed for a broad range of public health, health care, and childhood injury prevention professionals, so its visibility through the CDC Learning Connection will help the course reach a fittingly wide audience this month.
That expanded reach may help advocates from across fields take new approaches as they collaborate on shared injury prevention goals. “This course helps professionals start a conversation about how the injury prevention and brain development fields can converge to make safer communities for children and youth,” said Brownson.
Safe at Every Stage: Injury and Violence Prevention and the Developing Brain is a no-cost, 1.75-hour online course.
