Abstract
Injury was the largest single cause of disability-adjusted life years and death in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2013. The vast majority of injury-related fatalities are deaths caused by road traffic. Measures to control this serious public health issue, which has significant consequences for both Saudi families and the Saudi economy as a whole, have been underway for years but with little success. Most attempts at intervening revolve around attempts for enforcing stricter traffic laws and by installing automated traffic monitoring systems that will catch law breakers on camera and issue tickets and fines. While there has been much research on various factors that play a role in the high rate of road traffic injury in The Kingdom (e.g., driver behavior, animal collisions, disobeying traffic and pedestrian signals, environmental elements), virtually no attention has been given to examining why Saudi drivers behave the way that they do. This review provides a thorough account of the present situation in Saudi Arabia and discusses how health behavior theory can be used to gain a better understanding of driver behavior.
Highlights
According to the Global Burden of Disease (1), injury is the leading cause of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
The growth of cities mirrors the rising number of road traffic collisions since the 1970s (24), a trend that is illustrated in Table 2, which shows available data for the number of injuries and fatalities annually from 1971 to 2013
The statistics commonly cited in the literature regarding the frequency of injuries and deaths due to road traffic collisions report approximately four injuries and one fatality every hour
Summary
According to the Global Burden of Disease (1), injury is the leading cause of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In 2013, the most frequent cause of death in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was injury (1). Intentional injuries (i.e., homicide and suicide) account for only a small percentage of deaths caused by injury in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The homicide rate in Saudi Arabia is among the lowest when compared with other countries internationally (3). Data from the National Statistics Office indicates that the number of recorded homicides in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the period between the years 1999 and 2007 ranged from 173 to 301 annually, yielding annual rates of homicide between 0.9 and 1.3 per 100,000 population. Fatal injuries related to blunt trauma and strangling were the most common among homicide
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