Combining primary and secondary poison prevention in one initiative.

Objective: Contrary to the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on Forging a Poison Prevention and Control System, a certified regional poison information center combined both primary and secondary education with another public health initiative to determine if there was an impact on poison center awareness.
Methods: Poison Help stickers that contained the national toll-free poison center number were inserted into a quarterly publication from a children's hospital and mailed to 136,741 residents of a poison center service region. Benchmark data from a six-month period were used to compare call volume both before and after the initiative.
Results: Call volume increased by a mean of 8.8% from the counties where at least 5% of residents received the mailing.
Conclusions: A single passive mass-mailing education program that combined primary and secondary poison prevention education may have had a small, but positive impact on poison center call volume when a threshold of 5% of the residents received the information.