Accra, Oct. 2, GNA – A two-day training workshop on the development of road safety mass media campaign has ended in Accra with a call on policymakers to consider road traffic deaths and injuries as preventable public health crisis that must be addressed with urgency.
The workshop, organised by the National Road Safety Authority, Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) and Bloomberg Philanthropies for Global Road Safety (BIGRS), was to equip communication officers of road safety organisations with the requisite knowledge to help reduce crashes.
Dr Raphael Awuah, the African Regional Advisor on Data and Surveillance for Vital Strategies, said more attention should be paid to road safety issues as was being done to curb the spread of COVID-19.
He said there was increasing evidence that road traffic deaths were increasing yet no serious attention was being paid to the menace.
Data from the Global Burden of Road Traffic Crashes in lower-middle-income countries for 2019 to 2020 indicate that road traffic injuries were the tenth leading cause of deaths, he said.
Dr Awuah said 2013 and 2016 recorded approximately 27 deaths per 100,000 population in Africa.
He said casualties from road traffic crashes constituted a high proportion of all admitted cases in Accra, citing a two-year study by the Accident Centre of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, which revealed that about two out of five of all trauma cases, representing 40 per cent, were road traffic casualties.
That, he said, put a toll on the health sector, particularly emergency services, hence the need for stakeholders to focus on increasing resource allocation to reduce the deaths and injuries as a matter of urgency.
Dr Awuah said road traffic injuries were the only cause of deaths that could be prevented, adding: “We need to view the issue from the public health perspective… Road traffic injuries are the number one preventable injuries globally, and these disabilities, when they occur, are for life.”
He called on road safety agencies in the country to play their part in improving safety, particularly among vulnerable road users.
Mr Ebenezer Baidoo, the Road Injury Surveillance Coordinator for AMA-BIGRS, said the third Road Safety Annual Report, launched by the AMA, revealed that road traffic deaths in Accra per 100,000 rose from 4.9 in 2019 to 6.3 in 2020.
He said vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists, made up 76 per cent of total deaths in 2019 and 85 per cent in 2020.
The Report singled out areas such as Kwashieman Intersection, La Paz Intersection, Apenkwa Interchange to Dimple Roundabout, North Dzorwulu Intersection, Abeka Junction and Neoplan Intersection as the high-risk locations in Accra, he said.
Mr Osei Kufuor, the AMA-BIGRS Initiative Coordinator, urged stakeholders to adopt the Safe System approach, which sought to eliminate fatal injuries for road users by recognising that human error was no longer the only primary cause of road crashes but the failure of the road system as well.
GNA