Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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Road deaths

July 2005

Deaths on our roads are about 3500 per year. Obviously it would be nice to reduce this, but the amount of pressure to do so is our of all proportion to the possible savings of life. But closer inspection is needed of the figures.

For every death that occurs at the scene of a road accident, there are a much larger number of accidents that result in survivable injury. More than ten times as many people survive but need hospitalization. Some of these people never get it because of poor ambulance services. Theses people should not be registered as road traffic fatalities, but as casualties of the poor ambulance service, because they could have survived if only the ambulance service was adequate.

Of the remainder of potential survivors at the scene, a number reach hospital and die there. Some of these deaths are as a direct result of severity of the accident and are unavoidable. They are correctly attributed as road deaths. However, many so called road deaths actually occur in hospital as a result of mistakes, infections and negligence rather than as a direct result of their actual injuries. These should be attributed correctly to these causes as appropriate, and not simply lumped into road death statistics, as the road accident is not the actual cause of their death, only a contributory factor.

If deaths due to poor emergency service response and those caused by problems in the NHS are removed from the road death statistics, they would be very much smaller.

On current government figures, as many as one in ten patients contracts a serious infection while in hospital that could reasonably have been prevented. If 50000 people are admitted each year due to a road accident, and 10% catch a serious infection, and 10% of these die from it (fairly conservative figures), then this alone would account for 500 deaths every year that are attributed as road deaths that are actually caused by the NHS. Estimating that a few hundred others are caused by late arrival of emergency services (due to road congestion, poor logistics or poor practices), then as few as 2500 people per year are actually killed directly by road accidents. 1000 others who were seriously injured in the road accident die for other reasons.

Speed cameras cost a lot of money to install and run, and have only made a slight impact on road deaths so far. Perhaps the money spent on speed cameras would be far better allocated to improving hospital cleanliness, where it would be far more productive in terms of life saving. Because of course people don’t only go to hospital because of traffic accidents. The number of deaths due to avoidable hospital-contracted infections are at least 5000 per year. Reducing this by half would therefore save as many lives as are lost on the roads every year.

But it isn’t just infections. The number of people that are killed by the NHS every year is debatable, but figures of around 75000 have been derived by some bodies. This is made up of those who have died because of infections that they have caught while in hospital, notably MRSA, mistakes by doctors and nurses, those who die because of negligence, and those caused by inadequate skill of the surgical and caring staff. This figure totally dwarfs the figure for road deaths. And yet all of these are avoidable in principle. Whereas we already have the safest roads in the world so reducing road deaths still further will be very difficult.

Yet we see far less discussion in the media of these figures than the much smaller ones associated by road deaths. And there is far more political pressure to reduce the road death figures than to clean up hospitals or improve care practices to reduce the impact of negligence and errors.