Newfoundland Injury Law Blog

If a National Day of Remembrance for Road Crash Victims Is A Good Idea, What About the Victims of Health Care?

If your first reaction on hearing about a new National Day to promote this or that worthy cause is, “Good excuse for inaction”, then you’re like me.  But wait – the latest National Day, to mark road fatalities, has some real achievements behind it and a promising future.  And it got me thinking about how this country could tackle the even bigger scourge of death by misadventure in our hospitals.  But first a word about the progress made on road crashes.  

Canada has proclaimed an astonishing goal:  to dramatically reduce road accidents and have the safest roads in the world.  As a signpost of this goal, November 19, 2008 was proclaimed as Canada’s first National Day of Remembrance for Road Crash Victims. 

The annual road fatality toll is currently around 2700 souls, on a steady declining trend since the early 80’s.  Towards the year 2010, the national target calls for a 30% decrease in the average number of road users killed and seriously injured.   This would reduce the road fatality toll to fewer than 2,100 by 2010.

In 1998, Canada was ranked 9^th among developed countries for road safety based on fatality rates.  The present goal of our policymakers is to be ranked 1^st for safety.  The strategy to achieve this involves targeting high risk drivers.  High risk drivers are those who drink and drive, who speed excessively, who run red lights, and who do not wear seatbelts.  Road infrastructure initiatives to increase safety of road design, maintenance and operation are also part of the mission.

Much of the Newfoundland and Labrador road system is rural, and road configurations have been identified as causing 80% of fatalities on rural roads:  single vehicle crashes, head-on collisions, and collisions at intersections.  These collisions can be minimized by elaboration of explicit safety policies for rural roads.  More than half of all motor vehicle occupants killed in Canada suffered their fate in collisions on rural roads.

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians can congratulate ourselves that we are leaders in Road Safety Vision 2010.  Our province was recognized this fall for achieving the greatest percentage reduction in road fatalities in Canada for 2006.  

Compared to the 2001-2004 average, the national average for 2006 represented a reduction of 2%, and this province’s reduction was 12%.  Some revealing graphs and statistics are available at the province’s website, which show total motor vehicle traffic collisions and total injuries declining significantly since 2001, and total fatalities declining from 53 in 2000 to 37 in 2006.

The steady decline in fatal accidents has also occurred in the United States, where the trend has been accelerated by something not expected by the policymakers:  a huge drop in fatalities in March and April this year as gasoline prices skyrocketed.  This seems to have created a tipping point, causing drivers to change not just how much they drive, but where, when and how they drive.  We will see if this effect continues with the recent easing of prices, but the point of all this is, it is actually thinkable to have a dramatic reduction in serious road injuries and zero fatalities as a serious achievable policy goal.

Now if only government and our publicly funded health care system would focus on eliminating the causes of accidental injury and death (“serious adverse events”) that victimize 7 of every 100 people admitted to Canadian hospitals!  The accidental death toll in Canadian hospitals is about 10,000 per year, or 3½ times the annual death toll on our roads.  This is an epidemic by any measure, and a source of even more unnecessary deaths than road crashes.  So if we can make impressive progress in reducing road deaths by choosing this as a national goal, why not hospital safety too?

We’ll know the system is getting serious about hospital safety when government proclaims a National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Health Care.

Labels: National Day of Remembrance, road crash, hospital death and injury