Road crashes have forced the Government to spend billions of dollars on treatment annually, but attendant costs such as diagnostic services, hospital occupancy, physiotherapy and emotional trauma are taking a heavy toll on the country’s healthcare personnel.
Despite professional training and experience, healthcare personnel who are among first responders are traumatised by the severity of injuries from crashes, road-safety officials told a Gleaner Editors’ Forum on Thursday. Crashes have taken more than 160 lives up to May 16 and have scores of others with injuries requiring emergency surgery and long periods of recovery.
Dr Nicole Dawkins-Wright, emergency physician and representative of the Ministry of Health and Wellness at the forum, said crash victims and related injuries represented 30 per cent of the emergency cases in Jamaica’s hospitals.
“From my perspective as a care-giver, I am an emergency physician, and as such, I am on the floor. This is a subject matter that really comes home to me, because it’s not on command that we sit and wait for crash victims to come,” said Dawkins-Wright.
“This is a very high number, when compared not just to Sweden and the other First-World countries, but to other countries in the world of similar socio-demographic characteristics, our numbers tend to be on the high side.”
Injuries occurring from road crashes are among those called “non-intentional”, requiring significant surgical and emergency management time in treatment.
“Even though, for greater than a decade, we have recognised that injuries are a significant part of what we manage in the emergency department and our surgical services and intensive care units (ICU), as significant as it was then, it is likely to become more so, because … the numbers are coming in, and with more critical injuries, so they can’t be treated, in the other settings that we are not capturing on our data base,” the physician explained.
While she did not present a definitive monetary costs, she insisted that they were “very high”, indicating that even she had doubts that official estimates captured the on-the-ground realities.
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