Windsor Regional Hospital has received a special shipment of 30 colourfully decorated helmets from a group of University of Windsor students for the hospital’s trauma program.
The students made the donation Wednesday in the hopes of reducing preventable head injuries for bicyclists who don’t wear helmets.
The helmets are part of “Project: Brain Bucket” involving research by graduate, Daniella Mlinarevic, as part her master’s research in the school’s Cognitive Neurosciences Lab.
“We have a series of outreach programs designed to teach people about the brain and the processes it underwrites,” says University Professor Dr. Lori Buchanan, who runs the Cognitive Neurosciences Lab.
“These outreach programs range from a high school bike helmet awareness project to projects that work with, and for, people who have communication problems associated with some form of brain damage.”
The helmets will be used to educate patients who come to the hospital’s emergency departments with bike-related injuries.
Manager of the hospital’s regional trauma program and injury prevention department Diane Bradford says the helmets can be donated to patients following a bicycle mishap.
Bradford points out that a damaged helmet in a fall has to be replaced as they built to provide “one-time protection.”
Bradford says the donation is timely because “each year we see a substantial increase in the number of severe traumas beginning the Victoria Day long weekend.”
Recent stats suggest about 67 per cent of Windsor's youth under the age of 18 do not wear bicycle helmets
Students refer to the head protection as ‘Aphasia Prevention Helmets” as Aphasia is a communication disability caused by damage to the language processing centres of the brain.
