Award winning child safety project helping to raise awareness

A child safety project involving USQ, which raises awareness of child abuse, has won a 2008 Queensland Child Protection Award.

As part of the 2008 National Child Protection Week, from 7 to 13 September, the Awards acknowledged the efforts of those committed to preventing child harm, while the week promoted the value of children and focused attention on the issue of child abuse and neglect.

The project, entitled ‘Safehands', was a joint venture involving a number of different agencies and won the award in the education category.

''Safehands' is a media tool designed to raise awareness of the issues surrounding the physical abuse of children aged zero to four years,' USQ Business lecturer and ‘Safehands' steering committee member Dr Glenda Adkins said.

'It is a multi-agency initiative with the Queensland Police Service, Department of Child Safety, Queensland Health, Department of Communities, the Ipswich City Council, Brisbane Broncos and USQ all contributing to the project.'

Centred on the development of an informative DVD, the project is aimed at new mothers and has already had an encouraging response.

'The DVD highlights a number of issues regarding physical child abuse including shaken baby syndrome and neglect and features appearances from a number of Brisbane Broncos players,' Dr Adkins said.

'These included former Broncos players Petro Civoniceva and Brad Thorn and we also have Shane Webcke on board as our spokesman.

'Our idea was to take the DVD and also a parents pack to new mothers, which we did at Ipswich hospital where the mothers also answered a questionnaire.

'The majority of the mothers were happy with the DVD and it was all quite positive.'

Following the success of the pilot project in Ipswich, ‘Safehands' co-ordinators are now hopeful of distributing the DVD statewide.

'We are currently constructing a business case and will be submitting an application for a Cabinet Budget Review Committee grant,' Dr Adkins said.

'The funding is needed so that we can change the DVD slightly to include some different scenarios, and run a media advertising campaign.  We can hopefully roll it out across the state.'

Nominations for the 2008 Awards were taken from throughout Queensland in eight different categories.

Media Contact: Josh Ada, USQ Media, +61 7 4631 2559