Pediatricians ask families about gun safety 54% of the time

Pediatricians are much more likely to discuss noncontroversial safety topics — like smoke alarm safety — than to discuss best practices for gun storage with patient families, according to new research published by JAMA Pediatrics and featured by CNN.

Researchers designed a questionnaire for regular pediatric checkups that included the safety questions back-to-back. They examined health records of more than 16,500 visits from January 2017 to July 2018 to see how often pediatricians and pediatric residents asked the questions. The researchers found the clinicians asked about smoke alarms 78 percent of the time and gun safety only 54 percent of the time, according to the report.

The report notes that discussing gun safety with families is critical because an estimated 4.6 million children in the U.S. live in homes with loaded, unlocked firearms. Read the full story here.

 

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