According to the Child Fatality and Near Fatality External Review Panel, over one third of all child fatalities or near fatalities were related to ingestion of substances.

To help prevent these cases.

Co-Chair for kids has partnered with several Kentucky organizations to launch a medication safety campaign, emphasizing the importance of safe medication storage.

Unfortunately, far too many children in Kentucky go to an emergency room because they get into something they just shouldn't be into a medicine or a substance that is harmful to them.

And we know in Kentucky that most of those instances were preventable.

Nationwide, we know that a child goes to the emergency room once every few minutes after ingesting a substance that they should not, and that the vast majority of those instances are preventable.

We also know that in Kentucky, the number of children who have gotten into substances and ingested them has risen dramatically over the last few years.

And, in every case reviewed by the Kentucky Fatality and Fatality Review Panel, those children were four years of age and younger.

So, this is an issue that affects, all kids, but especially those that are age four and under.

So we have to do better.

We have to keep our kids safe in a really simple way to do that is by making sure medications are up in a way.

And the best way to do that is to make sure you lock it up.

Lock boxes are available, and county health departments throughout Kentucky, and those lock boxes can be used to safely store medicine, whether it's common over-the-counter medicines, whether it's prescription medicine, or even if it's illicit substances.

But we also have to know what's in the house.

We have to know that child resistant does not mean childproof.

We need to keep track of what we have, how many pills do we have?

How many of a certain type of medicine do we have?

Certainly, we don't want children to get into any of those things because, children just don't know.

They don't understand the dangers associated with ingesting something that they shouldn't.

We've got to do our part to keep kids safe.

To lower these rates of ingestions in Kentucky and make sure that our children are kept out of harm's way.

Additional resources, including those drug disposal locations, are online at face ID abuse.

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