Data - the key to meeting road safety targets

Early last year, the Australian government consulted on a new National Road Safety Strategy aimed at reducing the approximately 1200 deaths and 40,000 serious injuries on the nation’s roads each year. The strategy for 2021-30 set targets to reduce these numbers over the next 10 years, setting us on the path to achieve Vision Zero (zero deaths and serious injuries) by 2050. The strategy includes 2030 targets of: • a 50 per cent reduction in fatalities— down to fewer than 571 (an approximate reduction in rate per capita of 55 per cent) • an interim 30 per cent reduction in serious injuries—down to fewer than 29,000 (an approximate reduction in rate per capita of 38 per cent). If 2021 is anything to go by, we are not going to meet those targets. We won’t even come close.

As I write this in mid-December 2021, Australia has already surpassed the number of road deaths that we recorded in 2020. While comparisons are difficult given the impacts of COVID-19 and restricted movements, shockingly we are on target for a higher rate of fatalities in 2021 than we were in 2018. There was no COVID-19 then and movement was virtually unencumbered. We must do better. In 2021, the College responded to a draft of the National Road Safety Strategy, as well as separate road safety strategies in South Australia and Tasmania. In October 2021, I also wrote to both the Health Minister, the Hon. Greg Hunt and the Deputy Prime Minister and Assistant Minister for Road Safety & Freight Transport, the Hon Barnaby Joyce. In these letters, I provided the RACS Trauma Committee’s endorsement for the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations (UN) Global Plan Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021 – 2030. Similar to the Australian government’s plan, the WHO and the UN Global Plan sets a target to reduce road traffic deaths and injuries by at least 50 per cent over the next decade.

While the WHO and the UN share a similar ambition to Australia’s national plan, where it differs is in its much greater prioritisation of data collections linkages. Unfortunately, in 2021, Australia did not have the quality of nationally aggregated road crash injury hospitalisation data delivered rapidly enough to effectively oversight road safety, and it does not look like this will improve any time soon. Data collections and linkages play an integral role in policy development. We have seen firsthand how the collection and linkage of data during COVID-19 has assisted national governments to monitor and control the pandemic as best they could, and to maintain community awareness. The uptake of this information within the community demonstrates that the public has an appetite for, and an understanding of, information that affects the health of the nation. A similar approach for precise, consistent, and timely data collection and reporting of road trauma, including the numbers of road trauma patients in ICU beds, could easily be done. This would raise awareness of the costs of road trauma to families, the community, and the nation as a whole. If we are to come anywhere near meeting our targets, this is critical, and it is something the RACS Trauma Committee will continue to advocate for in the lead up to the federal election and beyond.

Dr John Crozier RACS Trauma Chair