Celebrate Poison Prevention Week with These Tips for Safety

National Poison Prevention Week (March 17-23) is a great time to add some simple safety tips to your parenting toolkit. Here are a few tips, resources, and videos to help keep your kids safe and also share with family, friends, and neighbors.

Simple Steps to Prevent Kids from Getting into Medicine

  • Keep all medicine out of children’s reach and sight, even medicine you take every day. Kids are naturally curious and can easily get into things, like medicine, if they are kept in places within their reach.
  • Choose child-resistant packaging whenever possible. If someone in your home is using pill boxes or other containers that are not child-resistant, it’s even more important to store these out of children’s reach and sight.
  • Use reminder tools to help keep track of medicine. Instead of keeping medicine on the counter or a nightstand, set a reminder in your phone or use a medicine schedule to remember when to give and take medicine.
  • Keep medicine safety on your child-proofing checklist. As your child learns new skills and becomes more mobile, anticipate that you may need to continue to assess and change where you keep medicine to avoid alarming surprises.
  • Save the Poison Help number in your phone and post it visibly in your home for caregivers: 1-800-222-1222. Specialists at poison control centers provide free, confidential, expert medical advice 24 hours a day. They help with poison emergencies and can also answer questions about medicine safety.

5 Things to Know About Kids and Medicine

Check out this infographic to learn five things that may surprise you about protecting your kids around medicine.

Keeping Kids Safe Around Medicine: Insights and Implications Inforgraphic

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Medicine Safety Videos

Surprises of Medicine Storage

This video shows some of the fun, and not-so-fun ways kids surprise us, including how kids can access medicine. For parents, life is full of unexpected surprises, so be as prepared as you can, particularly when it comes to medicine safety. 


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Simple Steps to Safe Medicine Storage

Check out this video to see what it means to keep medicine up and away, out of reach and sight. 


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You can also find the video translated into Spanish

Gary on the Street

We took to the streets to talk to parents about their medicine storage habits.


View the videoWatch on YouTube 

Other Helpful Medicine Safety Assets

Learn More about Medicine Safety

Check out our full list of medicine safety tips for families.

The Safe Kids Worldwide medicine safety program was developed with support from Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc.