Parents rue end to carseat services

A Plunket trainer shows a mum how to use her carseat properly. Photo / File

The closure of Plunket's carseat services will be a loss to the community, a Hawke's Bay parents' group says.

Plunket is phasing out its rental and retail carseat services, after more than 30 years in the business.

Plunket chief operating officer Andrea McLeod said it planned to stop the services in the next 12 to 18 months because fewer people were using them.

The move will leave a gap in the community, says Hawke's Bay Parents Centre acting president Gemma Wellum.

"It's a widely used service in Hawke's Bay," she said.

"There are other commercial providers but I don't know how well they'll fill the gap."

Some parents still hadn't learnt to carry children correctly, she said.

"When police and Plunket do stings to see if parents are using the correct restraints, there are always some who aren't.

"It's probably a case of parents not being aware that they're not doing it properly."

The cost of upgrading carseats was possibly another reason children weren't in correct restraints, she said.

The number of Plunket sites offering carseats has declined from 283 at its peak in the 1980s, to 72 today.

Despite efforts to make the service sustainable, sites throughout the country have been closing as they can no longer afford to operate.

Most sites only operate part-time, a few hours a day or several times a week.

"The decline indicates families' needs have changed," Ms McLeod said.

When Plunket started offering carseat and capsule hire in 1981, just 20 per cent of children were buckled in.

That number had risen to 93 per cent.

However, recently released data by Safekids Aotearoa showed car crashes were still a major cause of children's injuries and deaths.

From 2006 to 2010 10 Hawke's Bay children died in car crashes. That was the leading cause of children's deaths in the region and the second-highest number of children to die as a result of car crashes in the country.

Nationwide car crashes were the second most common cause of children's deaths, with suffocation the first.

Safekids Aotearoa director Ann Weaver said the number of car-crash deaths was far too high.

"In most cases the deaths were totally preventable," she said.

"Most parents use carseats but a lot aren't installed correctly.

"Most countries only have one standard for carseats but in New Zealand there are four - American, European, Australia/New Zealand and Japanese.

"We also import cars from different countries, so getting the right carseat for a car can be difficult."

Safekids believed children should have to be restrained until they reached a height of 148cm, she said.

"Seatbelts are designed for people 150cm and over. At the moment kids have to be in restraints until they're 7, but most aren't 150cm tall by then."

Ms Weaver said it was sad Plunket's carseat services were ending but she believed there were enough other retailers offering reasonably priced carseats parents could buy or hire carseats from.

Plunket would still work in carseat education but the scale of that work had yet to be decided. NZME.