While medicines help families feel better and stay well, it’s important to keep those bottles safe from curious kids. Wherever you may be. Every year, about 60,000 young kids are brought to emergency rooms because they got into medicines that had been left within their reach.
With June being National Safety Month, and travel at its highest, Up and Away and Out of Sight is offering these 8 tips to help parents safely store medicines whether you’re on the go, or in your own home.
1. When packing for a trip, keep your medicines in their original child-resistant containers. Other containers, such as pill organizers and plastic bags, generally lack child safety features meaning they can easily be opened by curious young children.
2. While staying in a hotel, secure your medicines and vitamins in a location that your children can’t see or reach. You can use a high cabinet or stash everything in the passcode-protected hotel room safe that’s often in the hotel room closet.
3. As a guest in another person’s home, ask where to put medicines and vitamins so they’re out of sight and reach of children. While there might not be a spot in your guest room, your hosts will definitely have a safe place for medicine that you can access, but kids can’t.
4. Never leave children’s medicines or vitamins on the kitchen counter or at a sick child’s bedside. It’s important to always put any bottles or medicine containers away after each dose. Even if you have to give the medicine again to your child in a few hours. Set an alarm on your phone if you think you’ll forget.
5. Always relock the safety cap on a medicine bottle. If the bottle has a locking cap that turns, be sure to twist it until you hear the click, or until you can’t twist it anymore.
6. Tell young children what medicine is and why you must be the only one to give it to them. Start your discussions with kids early about what medicine is, and why specified grown-ups — parents, grandparents, a nanny — are the only ones who can administer it. And be sure to never tell them it’s candy as a way to get them to take it more easily.
7. Make sure your own guests know to keep their medicine safe. Dedicate a special place for visitors where they can keep their belonging, so kids can’t get into them. Parents aren’t always thinking about what may be in Grandma’s pocketbook or a cousin’s overnight bag — or that children may be curious to investigate.
8. Save the Poison Help number 800-222-1222 in all your family’s phones so you have it at your fingertips when you need it. Dedicate a speed dial number to it on a landline. On your smartphone, text POISON to 797979 to save the contact information. You can even mark it as a favorite for one-touch access, just in case you should ever need it in a hurry.
Visit Up and Away and Out of Sight for more smart tips on keeping children safer around medicines.
This has been a sponsored message from the Consumer Healthcare Products Association Educational Foundation.
