Safety Lit February 2026

Kia ora e te whānau

Welcome back to another edition of our Safekids Aotearoa SafetyLit! This month, the articles we’ve collated focus mainly on health equity, home safety initiatives, and road safety. 

As our Button Battery Safety Campaign is live at the moment, we’ve also included a section for this with some recent publications. You can also view our Button Battery Campaign on our website here.

Let us know if you and/or your networks have any work / research that you’d like to include in this publication.  

Ngā manaakitanga, 

Ririki Haumaru Safekids Aotearoa

Racism and the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children: the need for targeted policy interventions to protect the health and wellbeing of our future generations.

These articles collectively explore practical, evidence-based approaches to preventing unintentional injury among young children, particularly in underserved and rural communities. They examine home safety equipment schemes, relationship-based support for families, culturally informed parental education interventions, empowerment of mothers to reduce household hazards, and the use of digital tools such as app-based programmes to drive behaviour change at scale.

We’ve added three important articles to our research hub exploring firearm-related harm and prevention. A new Aotearoa cohort study examines firearm-related hospitalisations and deaths from 2000 to 2023, providing vital local evidence on long-term trends and impact. Complementing this, international research explores how Child Access Prevention laws influence safe storage practices, and what caregivers of young children want to know about firearm safety and who they trust to hear it from. Together, these studies highlight the importance of strong policy, safe storage, and trusted, community-informed education to reduce risk and protect tamariki.

These articles focus on reducing road and transportation-related injuries among young children, with particular attention to parental knowledge and inequities in risk. One study details the development and validation of a health literacy scale designed to measure parents’ understanding of how to prevent road traffic injuries in children aged 0–6 years in China, highlighting the critical role of caregiver knowledge in early prevention. The second examines transportation injury inequities among Canadian children using population-level data, identifying disparities in risk across different communities. Together, the research underscores the importance of strengthening caregiver capability while also addressing systemic and social factors that influence child road safety outcomes.

Button battery ingestion remains a life-threatening emergency for young children. In this edition, we highlight two important new studies advancing both clinical response and prevention. One explores a novel in-vitro model demonstrating the protective benefits of honey in reducing oesophageal injury, while the other profiles real-world ingestion cases using Canadian and British Columbia poison centre data to strengthen the evidence for policy, packaging reform and system-level prevention. Together, these findings reinforce the urgency of early intervention and coordinated prevention efforts.