Road traffic-related injuries need to develop capacity building to provide comprehensive care

Abstract

Every year around the world, millions die on road generally from preventable causes and are major public health threat in current times with soaring figures of unnecessary and unacceptable burden of morbidity and disability. We attempted an extensive collection of published literature with specific inclusion criteria in PubMed, Cochrane, Web of Science, and WHO Global Health Library including additional search in indexed literature and website-based population survey reports. Ten percent of road accident fatalities worldwide occur in India, and in addition, more than a million are grievously injured every year. Moreover, victims with nonfatal injuries are forced to live with a range of physical and emotional disabilities with a colossal social and economic impact. In addition, the health-care costs allied with these injuries also create an immense threat to the already stretched out curative health-care load particularly in resource-poor settings of the developing third world countries. Notwithstanding such sobering data, road traffic injuries received less than optimal interest from national health planners to provide comprehensive care from primary health-care levels where maximum injuries come as first contact intervention. Injuries are not accidents and they do not occur by chance alone; like morbidity, they follow a classical model of epidemiological triad of agent-host-environment. Hence, by classifying the risk factors for injury as modifiable and nonmodifiable, it is most likely to forecast and prevent by models. There is a great need to validate brain injury biofluid biomarkers in the acute care setting such as in the emergency departments. The following core competencies are addressed in this article: Medical knowledge, Patient care and procedural skills, and Systems-based practice.