Teen related
car crashes are the leading cause of permanent injury and deaths in teens.
There are some 8,000 deaths and some 400,000 injuries ANNUALLY across North
America! There is now a new initiative designed specifically to reduce
these numbers, dubbed the I Promise Program.
The I Promise
Program consists of a comprehensive parent-youth mutual safe driving contract
and a rear window decal. The process provides parents with a structure
for discussing and negotiating matters that correlate most with youth related
car crashes. Upon signing the contract, parent and youth seal their commitment
by affixing the rear window decal to the vehicle. The decal displays a
toll free number that enables the community to make reports on driver behaviour.
Reports are taken by a call center and forwarded by mail to the parent
to be dealt with as per the terms of the family contract.
The primary distribution
plan is through partnerships with automobile insurance companies. This
creates a partnership of mutual interest between parents and the insurance
companies: injury prevention for teens and loss prevention for participating
insurers. The economic burden of teen car crashes is estimated in excess
of $32.2 billion U.S. annually. Given cooperation of the insurance industry
we are targeting a modest 10% reduction, whilst commercial vehicle monitoring
services have been shown to reduce costs by as much as 53%. We would like
the insurance community to fund the program and indeed we do have one company
in Canada now prepared to do so.
To date George
Cooke, president of the Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company is
the first to sign on. The Dominion of Canada is Canada's 10th largest insurance
company. Distribution will begin in January 2002. Mr. Cooke is also the
chairman of the board for the Insurance Bureau of Canada. He is taking
the lead on this with several other Canadian insurers watching on. We are
currently chatting with many other insurers both in the U.S. and Canada.
More information
about the program is available at: www.ipromiseprogram.com
The program
has been developed with the input of persons representing hundreds of interested
organizations including government, medical organizations, parent groups,
injury prevention groups, police services, etc. While you navigate the
site, you may view the parent-youth mutual safe driving contract, over
80 letters of support received (many from organizations that have contributed
comments for program development) and several dozen articles published
about this initiative.
In addition
to letters of support, the Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation, an Ontario Ministry
of Heath funded organization, has itself awarded a research grant of $103,000
to conduct a series of focus groups this fall to facilitate our launch.
The research is conducted by Plan-it Safe, a research program out of the
Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in affiliation with the University
of Ottawa. In the U.S. we have research support from Harvard, School of
Public Health, Dr. Kimberly Thompson of the KidsRisk program.
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Information Provided By
www.ipromiseprogram.com
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