Emergency Department Brief Intervention to Increase Carbon Monoxide Detector Use

Carbon Monoxide (CO) exposure kills and injures thousands of children and families each year. Although there is growing concern about the need to increase carbon monoxide detector use, little is known about how best to do so, especially for low-income families. The objective of this research is to determine whether a brief intervention, Project Carbon Monoxide Detector Education (Project CODE), will increase CO detector use. For this study, parents of children, 18 years or younger, will be randomly assigned to receive Project CODE (an educational tool and a CO detector) or usual care (a flyer on CO poisoning); both of which will be delivered in the Pediatric Emergency Department (PED) examination rooms. The use of a CO detector and the participant's current stage in the theory of stage-based behavior change-the Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM), will be assessed at enrollment and then again at the home visits which will occur two-weeks and six-months following the PED visit. The investigators hypothesize that parents receiving Project CODE will have working CO detectors and will be further along in the PAPM than parents in the control group at the two-week and six-month home visits. The long term goal of this research is to reduce the number of injuries and deaths from CO poisoning.