The aim of my research is to investigate the extent to which visual impairment (VI) or hearing impairment (HI) affects a child's risk of unintentional injury (UI), and the association of that UI with a range of child, family and environmental factors. A systematic review I carried out demonstrated a paucity of studies, with the highest level of evidence found being case control studies. UI is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality for children, with the major global childhood UI killers being road traffic injury, drowning, fire related burns, falls and poisoning. Some of these areas of key interest to my research were not looked at by any studies, including drownings and fire-related injuries. Only one paper dealt with road traffic injuries, and only two case reports looked at poisonings. The severity of impairment, dental injuries, activity levels and effect of co-morbidity were described as needing higher level research.

No epidemiologically robust population-based cohort studies were found. The ALSPAC study has already collected detailed longitudinal data on sensory impairments and all the major childhood unintentional injuries, as well as a wide range of other relevant factors such as socioeconomic circumstances. The data is highly relevant to my area of research interest with detailed vision variables at age 7 and 11, detailed hearing variables at age 7, 9 and 11 and detailed unintentional injury variables at 5, 7, 11 and more specialised data at 13 and 16.