One in four road accident victims usually need hospitalisation, shows a recently published study that calls for interventions to decrease mortality risk for two-wheeler users in the country.
Over five thousand road accident victims who presented to a tertiary hospital during a nine-month period were enrolled in the study. Based on victims’ clinical records, interviews and demographic data, researchers concluded that 27.3% of the patients needed hospital admission while the rest were treated as out-patients.
The study authored by a team of Indian researchers and one American researcher from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was published in the journal Surgery .
Besides findings on the need for hospitalisation, which places unforeseen economic burden on victims and their families, researchers also found that over a fifth of the accident victims were pedestrians, while 58.2% of them were two-wheeler riders.
Bigger loss
“For every victim who seeks hospital care, there are several who do not. Besides trauma of the accident, the bigger loss, most importantly economic due to loss of work days or loss of source of income in case of death, are huge in our country,” said one of the study authors Shailaja Tetali, assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Public Health in Hyderabad.
India’s roads account for the biggest number of traffic fatalities in the world among which two-wheeler users are in overwhelming numbers. In Indian cities including Hyderabad, life-saving measures, including use of helmet and seatbelts, are often disregarded. A related study by Dr. Tetali and others published in March in the journal Public Health showed that helmet use among two-wheeler riders is significantly smaller than self-reported helmet use in the city.
In Telangana alone, over 7,000 people died in road accidents in 2015 while over 22,000 were injured. Of the total number of deaths in that year, over 2,500 were two-wheeler users at the time of the accident, the National Crime Records Bureau reveals. However, the Surgery study points to a much higher rate of mortality – of all the deaths that occurred during the study period in the hospital, nearly half of them were two-wheeler users.
Organ donation
The rising number of organ donations in the State over the past few years also attests to the growing number of road accidents, where the victims most often are two-wheeler users. Of the 58 cases of donations made this year to the State-run cadaver donation programme Jeevandan, 39 were from road accident victims.
Of the 251 donations made since the start of Jeevandan until the end of last year, 211 of the donors had lost their lives in vehicle accidents.
