Abstract
Aim: The Swedish Government has a long tradition of setting quantified time-bounded road safety targets. Thisarticle identifies and analyses these targets, and evaluates the national road safety targets adopted in 1989, 1996 and1998 in order to assess whether the different targets fulfil the SMART criteria of being specific, measurable, achievable,realistic and time bounded.Methods: This study is a retrospective case study and in order to trace all relevant policy documents that containinformation on quantified targets, a snowball technique was applied. The searching process result in a total of 23 keydocuments and these were analyzed in two steps. The first step examined how the targets have been formulated andthe second step assessed whether the targets had been constructed according to the SMART criteria.Results: This study shows that, although all the specified targets were theoretically achievable, those targetsadopted in 1996 and 1998 were, according to this evaluation, unrealistic.Conclusion: This study raises the question as to the rationality of political leaders when adopting targets whichcould be difficult to achieve in reality. One explanation for their adoption is that unrealistic targets could serve as amanagement tool in that they could be rational from a road safety point of view because they could inspire stakeholdersto do more than they would otherwise have done. In this article, other motives behind the setting of unrealistic targetsare also discussed.
Highlights
Public health policies are initiated and implemented in order to change the future
As early as in 1972, the former Swedish Road Safety Office presented four different time-bounded quantified targets for 1977 [22]. This was probably the first time in the world that a public authority suggested this type of time-bounded quantified road safety targets
These targets were not adopted by the Swedish government or the Swedish parliament but it started a public debate about managing road safety with support of goals and targets and in 1982 the Swedish government and the Swedish parliament adopted for the first time qualitative goals (Table 1)
Summary
Public health policies are initiated and implemented in order to change the future When this future is expressed as something desirable and wanted, we usually refer to it in terms of aims or goals. In the field of public health, the strategy of setting quantified national targets that are to be achieved by a particular date has been recommended and applied over the last three decades. In 1999, it was adopted as the public health strategy in Europe for the 21st Century [7]. This target setting strategy appears in a number of national public health policy documents and programmes [8]
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