Pilot evaluation of instructing parents of newborns about poison prevention strategies.

Providing new parents with both written and verbal information about poisons and with syrup of ipecac appeared to be successful when distributed at discharge of their normal newborns. New parents who received neither information nor ipecac served as controls. Distribution occurred during a nine-month period, which was followed after an interval of three months by a four-month evaluation period. The average (+/- SD) time between infant poison exposures and parent telephone calls to the statewide poison center during the evaluation period was 5 +/- 3 minutes for the subjects and 12 +/- 4 for age-matched and socioeconomically matched controls. Both groups had similar frequencies of potentially dangerous exposures for which syrup of ipecac was recommended. Subject parents appeared to have homes which in various respects were significantly more child-safe than those of the controls. Significantly more control homes contained syrup of ipecac after the exposures than before (77% vs 41%).