Helmets Not Only Save Heads, They Also Save Lives

It’s summertime here in my area in North America and the Northern hemisphere in general so those of you down in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other places that listen to the show, bear with me, I know it’s winter time where you are but we do need to address some things here. Think about what’s going on in your community and kind of apply the same kind of concepts but here where we are, we have kids involved in sports, we have a lot more kids out of school so they are out on the street and doing different activities, skateboarding, roller blading, riding their bikes. Are they using the proper safety equipment for the sports activity or the recreational activity? If they aren’t, they need to be. In this article over at the WebMD site that I found is talking about sports safety: helmets save heads. I love that article title; I think it’s a great headline.

Helmets save heads, which is really so very true and we’ve seen it, we know that helmets save heads and really save lives. But when you think about head injuries and serious head injuries associated with bicycle accident, motorcycle accident, sports injury; if they don’t result in death, they result in severe disability that ends up costing the patients, their families and ultimately all of us as taxpayers for a disabled individual, a whole lot of money and it’s a lot cheaper to spend the money on a high quality, well-fitted, appropriate helmet for an activity and then encouraging and ensuring that people are wearing the right helmet for the right job to make sure that they are protected adequately.

I look at articles like this and really think about again, what could you be doing in your community to encourage kids to wear helmets during different activities? What could you be doing in your community to look at? What kind of appropriate sports safety equipment is available for different organized sporting activities? What are the teens in your area using? These are all great community outreach efforts and they are great ways to avoid having some of those tragic calls that we’d really rather not have. We don’t want to see a call where a kid was riding his bike and fell off his bike and smacked his head on the pavement and now he’s got severe disability or is dying or has a closed head injury. We just don’t need that, and it was easily preventable. So let’s get on this band wagon, let’s be part of the prevention team in our communities and a part of that is promoting the appropriate use of sports safety equipment.

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This article has been featured in the news segment of the MedicCast podcast episode Asthma for EMS and Episode 227