THE Road Safety Authority (RSA) and gardai launched their New Year Road Safety Campaign in collaboration with the National Spinal Injuries Unit in the Mater Hospital before Christmas.
The focus of this year’s campaign is serious injuries as a result of collisions as statistics showed that 19,681 people were seriously injured in a collision in the period 1996 to 2011.
A further analysis of the statistics shows that the number of serious injuries has decreased in recent years, in line with the reduction in road fatalities, with the lowest number of serious injuries recorded in 2011 (440).
This was echoed in the presentation given by Keith Synnott, Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at the Mater Hospital who said that in the past, most spinal cord injuries admitted to the hospital were as a result of road collisions (up to 50 per cent in many studies), but that this had significantly reduced in recent years.