Last Friday, Shore Medical Center hosted a carseat checkup event. They had a huge turnout of families that came out for the event. Safe Kids Southern NJ and the New Jersey Medical Emergency Services for Children teamed-up with Shore Medical Center to conduct a free car seat checkup event on Friday, July 7. The event was held between 2 and 5 p.m. at Shore Medical Center, located at 100 Medical Center Way in Somers Point, NJ, in the lot at the corner of Medical Center Way and Bay Avenue. The car seat check was free and open to the public, and was held in conjunction with Shore Medical Center’s weekly Farmers Market & Craft Fair.
Parents, grandparents and expectant parents brought their car seats and manuals, vehicle manuals, and their children. Certified child passenger safety technicians inspected the seat’s installation and showed participants how to correctly install the seat and secure the child, with time allotted for reinstallation by the participant for practice purposes. Each installation and demonstration took approximately 10 minutes.
According to Safe Kids, when installed and used correctly, child safety seats and safety belts can prevent injuries and save lives. Child safety seats can reduce fatal injury by up to 71 percent for infants and 54 percent for toddlers (ages 1 to 4). From 1975 through 2013, an estimated 10,421 lives were saved by child safety seats or adult seat belts for children ages 4 and under. In 2011, 98 percent of caregivers of children ages 8 and under used restraints when transporting their children, but almost half of these caregivers did not use the restraint correctly, which reduces the protection provided in the event of a crash.
