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Traffic safety in selected countries: hospital-based evidence

Our present issue includes studies from Pakistan, Malawi, China, Qatar, Iran, Uganda, Ghana, Israel, Ireland and Australia. Two-thirds of the papers are based on hospital-based records of traffic crashes. This is an important contribution towards identifying additional source of data for traffic safety, other than the records of traffic police which tend to underreport injury crashes. The focus in the present issue is largely on matters relating to safety and mobility. The presentation by Abdulbari Bener et al. is a hospital-based study on the trends and characteristics of injuries in Qatar. This is the first comparative study of its kind to emanate from Qatar, based on a retrospective analysis of 53,366 patients over a fiveyear period. The majority of people at risk, it was found, were non-Qatari males under the age of 30. Work place and road-traffic injuries were the most common. There needs to be promotion and greater awareness of safety policies to reduce the number and severity of injuries in Qatar. Tahir Muhammad et al. have presented a paper, the first of its kind to emanate from Lahore in Pakistan – on the burden of road-traffic crashes in Lahore over a period of six years from 2005 to 2010. On average, 7000 lives are lost due to road-traffic crashes in Pakistan. The free ambulance service offering prehospital care (‘Rescue 1122’) was started in Lahore in 2004. This study focuses on the demographic characteristics, injury patterns and cause of road traffic crashes, managed by Rescue 1122. The burden of emergency calls for the ambulance service is increasing with time. Male motorcyclists in the 16–35 age group had the highest percentage of involvement in roadtraffic crashes and policy makers will have to tackle this problem on an urgent basis. It is not uncommon to find, in several parts of the world, that there is a great deal of under-reporting of road traffic crashes which creates a major gap in the crash data. Salifu Mohammed et al. have studied this phenomenon in Ghana, which includes both underrecording and non-reporting. This study was undertaken to establish realistic estimates in the shortfall in data between the actual number of road traffic crashes and the official information available in the national database: the data on road traffic crashes available with the police is less than that which is available with the hospitals and varies according to the crash severity. Collision type, road user type, age and sex of casualty, vehicle ownership, time of crash occurrence, road environment, region, time of retrieval of data from the police were all identified as having a profound influence on the level of under-reporting. Currently, the official road traffic fatality figures in Ghana require an adjustment factor of 1.37 to take account of the shortfall in under reporting. Police crash reports still give the most reliable and detailed information about the crashes/casualties and the circumstances surrounding their occurrence compared to hospital data. Hospital data can on the other hand give supplementary information. Karen McGreesh et al. from the department of Physiotherapy in the University of Limerick in Ireland have submitted a presentation on ‘Vehicle head restraint (HR) positioning knowledge and behaviours in a sample of Irish drivers’. A correctly fitted head restraint can reduce the chance of sustaining an acute whiplash injury in a rear impact collision. The correct head restraint position is influenced as much by the driver behaviour as the characteristics of the restraint itself. This presentation examines the correlation between correct HR positioning and actual HR positioning standards in a section of the Irish population, and also investigates in the process, the driver age, gender and vehicle age as they relate to HR positioning. It was found that most vehicles had poorly positioned HR. It was felt that both driver education and car manufacturer innovation in HR design would go a long way in improving the safety factor. Christopher Cherry et al. have contributed a very interesting paper from China entitled, ‘Illegal midblock pedestrian crossings in China: gap acceptance, conflict and crossing path analysis’ ‘China’s urban city blocks are very long; this often leads to midblock crossings that are informal or illegal. The present study focuses on a six-lane arterial in Kunming tracking accepted and rejected gaps in a two-stage crossing from roadside International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion Vol. 19, No. 4, December 2012, 311–312