Since I found out I was pregnant, I have read over a dozen articles and books about baby proofing the house and every single expert recommends putting drugs and medications out of baby’s reach, or better yet, purchasing a baby lock for your medication that will keep your curious baby safe. As sound of advice as that is, it really doesn’t address the issue of keeping your children safe after they are able to climb, open doors, or unlatch baby locks. The MedSafe is the first babyproofing product I have seen that is truly kid-proof and still allows parents to easily access their necessary medications.
The MedSafe is an impact resistant polymer locking safe that is designed to work like a traditional combo safe that secures your valuables. Instead of storing precious jewels or cash, the MedSafe is designed to hold all of your prescription and over-the-counter medications (up to 15 bottles) and keep your kids from accessing them on their own, even well after babyproofing age.
The MedSafe is fairly compact and can be stored in bathrooms, pantries, nightstands and more easily and safely. The MedSafe comes with screws to attach to the wall, but you can also use double sided tape to secure safely in metal cabinets or dressers. Since we don’t have anywhere near 15 medications in our house, we put other items we wanted to keep baby out of in our MedSafe, like fingernail clippers, scissors and razor blades.
I did notice that some of the medications we do have were a bit tall for the Med Safe, since it has one fixed shelf running midway through the safe, so we had to turn those bottles on their sides to get them to fit inside. A height adjustable shelf would be one of my most emphatic suggestions on the next version of the MedSafe, but definitely not a deal breaker with a product that ensures the safety of our children.
The statistics on drug related deaths and injuries offered on the MedSafe site were truly shocking and reaffirmed my desire to remove every trace of medications from our unlocked medicine cabinet for good. Citing data about accidental overdoses of young kids as well as teenagers, it really opens your eyes as to how vulnerable kids are at all ages and all you can do to protect them.
Their website focuses on the Teen drug abuse problem, which every parent thinks will never happen to them or their children, but only the families with locked medicine cabinets can be reassured won’t. Deaths related to prescription drug overdoses happen every 5 minutes, according to http://www.helpsaveourkids.com/, which is more than 3 times greater than the number of gun related deaths each year. Most parents wouldn’t dream of an unlocked firearms in their house but leave their medications out for anyone to access (even extremely rude houseguests who enjoy snooping through medicine cabinets – 39% of them according to MedSafe’s website) which is incredibly scary to me.
No one ever kicks themselves and says “I wish I hadn’t been so gosh darn safe,” but the opposite unfortunately is not true. Just one mistake or accident can truly happen in an instant and it really does pay to be safe rather than sorry.
http://www.helpsaveourkids.com/ to Join their fight to have 5 Million Homes Secured by 2011!
A big thank you to An Island Life and MedSafe for making my medicine cabinet and family safer. MedSafe offered the sample to review and no other type of compensation was received.
