Pennsylvania Abusive Head Trauma Prevention Program

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Traumatic Brain Injury; Child Abuse; Injury

Treatments: Behavioral: PA Abusive Head Trauma Prevention Program Booster: Central PA; Behavioral: PA Abusive Head Trauma Prevention Program: State-wide

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other; Other U.S. Federal agency

Identifiers

NCT00727116

U49CE001274

Details and patient eligibility

About

This project is designed to evaluate a statewide, hospital-based parent education program to prevent abusive head trauma (AHT) in Pennsylvania, and investigate the additional effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of "booster" sessions of parent education delivered to parents at primary care provider offices in central Pennsylvania.

Specific Aims:

1. Assess the effectiveness of an established statewide program of hospital-based postnatal parent education about violent infant shaking, provided at a single consistent point in time between the infant's birth and hospital discharge, in reducing the incidence of AHT.
2. Identify which component(s) are the most important mediators of the intervention's effectiveness; determine whether the intervention effect is more directly related to changes in perpetrator or caregiver behavior; and determine the effectiveness of the intervention among various socioeconomic groups.
3. Determine the cost effectiveness of the hospital-based program.
4. Establish the feasibility, additional costs, and effectiveness of a combined program of repeated exposure delivered both post-natally in the hospital and during follow up 2-, 4- and 6-month outpatient health maintenance visits with the pediatric care provider.

Full description

Upon the birth of the child, all parents (mothers, and whenever possible, fathers or father figures) will be asked to read written materials and view an 8-minute video on the dangers of violent infant shaking. Parents will be asked to voluntarily sign a commitment statement affirming their receipt and understanding of the materials; these commitment statements will be sent to the Principal Investigator. A random subset of parent participants will be asked to voluntarily answer a short questionnaire about their impressions of the materials. In addition, 31 counties in central Pennsylvania will be randomly divided into two groups. In 15 counties, the hospital-based intervention will remain as described above. In the other 16 counties, all primary care providers having offices in those counties will be asked to provide all parents of newborns at the 2-, 4-, and 6-month immunization visits another set of written materials about violent infant shaking and voluntarily sign a response form that they read and understood the materials. Participating parents in this group will also be asked if they would be willing to complete a short telephone survey when the infant is 7 months old (and if so, asked to provide a telephone number). The telephone survey asks questions about the intervention materials and parents' perception of the information, and seeks to determine the mediators of a program effect. An invitation letter will be sent to a control group of parents who do not receive the office-based intervention to ask if they would be willing to complete the short telephone survey when their infant is 7 months old.

Enrollment: 949,609 patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

• Parents giving birth in a PA hospital

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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949,609 participants in 2 patient groups

State-wide

Experimental group

Description:

All parents of newborns in Pennsylvania hospitals will receive the parent education materials

Treatment:

Behavioral: PA Abusive Head Trauma Prevention Program: State-wide

Central PA

Experimental group

Description:

All of Central PA new parents will receive the state-wide hospital-based intervention. In half of the 31 central PA counties, all primary care providers having offices in those counties provide an office-based booster intervention to new parents. The other half of central PA counties will receive the state-wide, hospital-based intervention, but not the office-based booster intervention.

Treatment:

Behavioral: PA Abusive Head Trauma Prevention Program: State-wide

Behavioral: PA Abusive Head Trauma Prevention Program Booster: Central PA