Drowning prevention through school health education. Evaluation of the SOS 112 pilot project

BACKGROUND // Drowning represents one of the main causes of child mortality. Water-related incidents are preventable and should be addressed through health education. The aim of this study was to evaluate an educational program for eight-year-old students based on a song with content on drowning prevention.METHODS // A feasibility pilot study was conducted, including forty-six children enrolled in a public school in Santiago de Compostela (A Coruna, Spain). The study was developed in three phases. In the first step, a group of experts and musicians created the educational content and the song. Secondly, the evaluation tool was developed, and finally, the program was implemented based on flag recognition, how to help in a drowning situation, safe swimming attitudes, and information about the emergency phone number 112. The percentage of correct responses by children before and after the educational intervention were compared using the McNemar test. RESULTS // Approximately half of the children were unaware of the meaning of the flags. After listening to the song, all students identified the meaning of the red flag, and over 90% recognized the green and yellow flags (p<0.001). Before the intervention, children correctly identified, on average, 75.3% of the safe water attitude pictograms. This perception of safe attitudes significantly increased post-intervention (p<0.001), with recognition of 86.4% of the correct behaviours. The overall water safety score also significantly improved by 22.7% after the intervention (p<0.001).CONCLUSIONS // The educational song is a resource to promote the learning of signals and concepts related to child drowning prevention.