Beaumont Hospital has started a research programme into road deaths in an effort to find new means of preventing death and serious injury on the roads and to improve treatment of accident victims.
The programme, the first of its kind in Ireland, was announced yesterday at a conference in the hospital on road traffic accidents. Several speakers called for the provision of a helicopter pad at Beaumont Hospital. According to the principal research scientist at General Motors, Dr Leonard Evans: "The conventional wisdom today is if you can get an injured person to a modern trauma centre and they are alive, they have a very good chance of pulling through, so speed in getting patients to a trauma centre is vital."
The head of the Garda National Traffic Bureau, Chief Supt John O'Brien, said the provision of a helicopter pad would be very beneficial in reducing road deaths. "There is a time delay sometimes in getting the accident victims to a centre for acute treatment. It can range from an hour to a multiple of that, and we are very conscious that a helicopter pad at this location would have a very beneficial effect."
Road accidents are the leading cause of death for young people in all countries which have motor traffic, according to Dr Evans. Yet there is a tradition of underfunding research into road deaths, he said.
"We need much more information at specific crash level, such as whether the occupants were wearing seat belts, whether seat belts were used properly, the specifics of the crash, the severity of the crash."
He said he supported the introduction of random breath-testing of drivers. "The state of New South Wales introduced random testing some years ago and it proved very effective. Overall fatalities declined by 19 per cent. It was introduced in other states subsequently with similar results."
The trauma co-ordinator at Beaumont Hospital, Ms Maria Fitzgibbon, said road accidents used up more than 60,000 hospital bed days each year. "The resource demands are huge in terms of radiology labs, huge amounts of intensive care commitment and other demands."
Dr Denis Wood, a consulting engineer, said the aim of the research was "to attempt in an Irish context to establish relationships between the pattern of vehicle damage and injuries caused and to use that information to help the surgeons and medical people treating that trauma to do it more effectively."
He said there was a lack of specific information on the speed of vehicles at the moment of impact, how occupants moved within the vehicle as a result of impact, and how they suffered various injuries; whether it was, for example, through contact with hard or soft parts of the interior of the car.
Chief Supt O'Brien said the European Union aimed to lower the road speed by 5 km per hour. The EU believed that this relatively small reduction would reduce the number of road deaths by 25 per cent.
He said that of the 1.7 million drivers licensed in Ireland, 327,000 were on provisional licences. However, "there is no great international experience indicating that those people holding their first stages of driving licences are more likely to be involved in accidents. Young males under 40 are the high risk, and 25-to-34s are the key risk group in terms of road deaths, predominantly among males."
Dr Evans said that the relationship between driver skill and safety was difficult to assess. "The group of drivers with the quickest reaction time, the best visual acuity and the best knowledge about and interest in motor vehicles is also the group with the highest crash risk, namely young males.
"Racing drivers have higher on-the-road crash risks. Increased skill is usually used to get into more risky situations", so the theory that more skilled driving led to safer driving was not clear.
He said that, generally, more vehicles on the road meant more accidents, although not necessarily. The quality of roads was among the other factors. "The fatality risk on an urban interstate freeway in the US is 80 per cent lower than on a rural two-lane road", he said. "So if you can construct a road in which traffic moving in opposite directions cannot interact in any way, this is much safer than if cars travelling in opposite directions can hit each other."