The North American Guidelines for Children's Agricultural Tasks (NAGCAT) were developed to assist parents and others in assigning appropriate and safe jobs to children 7 to 16 years who are living and/or working on farms across North America. The proposed research aims to build upon the NAGCAT project by providing a field test of the Guidelines for relevance, applicability, and effectiveness. The purpose of the proposed study, Evaluation of NAGCAT Using a Case Series of Injuries, is to systematically apply NAGCAT to case descriptions of fatal and non-fatal farm injuries experienced by children in order to determine whether their application may have prevented the injury occurrence. Specifically, we propose to assemble a large case series of traumatic childhood farm fatalities and injuries in the United States and Canada using existing surveillance data, coroner/medical examiner records, case investigation reports, and national survey data. Once this unique database on childhood farm injuries has been assembled, NAGCAT will be systematically applied to these case descriptions. The use of real life childhood farm injury cases will provide some evidence of the extent to which application of NAGCAT may have reduced the occurrence of these injuries and also highlight common injury mechanisms/circumstances that may not be covered by NAGCAT.
