Assessment of a brief intervention for abusive head trauma prevention in Brazil

Among the modalities of child maltreatment, pediatric abusive head trauma (AHT) stands out for its severity. Despite the high prevalence of child abuse in Brazil, there are few preventive actions against AHT. This study aimed... [ view full abstract ]

Among the modalities of child maltreatment, pediatric abusive head trauma (AHT) stands out for its severity. Despite the high prevalence of child abuse in Brazil, there are few preventive actions against AHT. This study aimed to evaluate a preventive intervention on AHT with parents. The intervention included 254 parents of infants up to 12 months or gestational stage, randomly divided into an experimental and a control group. Participants were mostly women (97%) and married (73%). The mean age of participants was 27 years old, the mean monthly income was US$ 10.270,42 (middle class in Brazil), and they had 12 years of schooling in average. Methodology: Participants were invited to take part of the study at Public or Private Health Units while they waited for a medical appointment or at prenatal orientation groups. The study design for the experimental group was pretest - intervention - posttest - follow-up and for the control group was pretest - pretest 2 - intervention. The intervention included the exhibition of an informative video entitled Responding to a Crying Baby and reading a pamphlet about AHT. The Attitude towards the Infant Crying Scale was used to assess parental knowledge about the infant’s crying, consequences of shaking, and strategies to deal with a crying infant. Parental knowledge of the experimental group was compared to knowledge of the control group at the three evaluations. Results: statistically significant differences were observed between pretest and posttest for the experimental group for knowledge on: consequences of shaking, infant crying pattern, and strategies to deal with a crying baby (p <0.001). The knowledge increase was maintained one month after the intervention, suggesting its effectiveness.