Do you know how to store medicine safely?
This week is National Poison Prevention Week, and as one of the KYOTC blogger ambassadors, today I wanted to talk to you about something that literally only takes five minutes, but has the potential to save your child’s life. Lots of us are not always storing our medicine safely.
That is not an exaggeration. Every year 60,000 kids go to the emergency room due to accidental medicine ingestion. That is FOUR bus loads of kids every day!
So on National Poison Prevention Week the Know Your OTCs program would like us to do something really simple:
Put our medicine away.
If medicines are up high in medicine cabinets, out of reach and out of sight, then they are MUCH less likely to be accidentally ingested by kids. It is safer for our kids and our families.
According to SafeKids, “half of the 2 million calls to poison control centers in 2011 were for exposures and ingestions among kids 5 and under.” We want those numbers to be much lower!
Part 1: This week, take the time to participate in this challenge and make sure that all of the medicines in your home are stored safely out of reach. If you do not have a medicine cabinet, you can store medicine on the top shelf of a linen closet and consider getting a latch at a home improvement sore to lock that closet. Install the latch high and out of a child’s reach.
Part 2: The second part of this challenge is to make sure that you have a conversation with your kids so that they know that only you or another caregiver should be the one to give them medicine. They should never try to take medicine by themselves. Parents should also never say that medicine, even vitamins, are like candy. Even if your child doesn’t like to take medicine, do not ever tell him that it is candy to try to convince him to cooperate.
Part 3: Post the number for the Poison Control Center somewhere in your home. We keep a list of emergency numbers on the side of our refrigerator. Keep this number somewhere handy and save it in your cell phone: 1-800-222-1222.
If you participate in storing your medicines safely, share a picture of your medicine cabinet or linen closet with your safe medicine storage ideas on Instagram. Follow and tag @KnowYourOTCs and use #MedsUpAway anytime between March 20-March 25.
This is a sponsored post on behalf of KYOTCs, although I completely support safe medicine storage and keeping our kids safe, so all opinions are my own!
Thank you for visiting the blog today! I so appreciate your pins and shares. If you liked this post, you may also like:
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