Supporting Road Safety Week

At Essex & Herts Air Ambulance (EHAAT), we’re proud to support road safety charity Brake during Road Safety Week and their work to highlight that ‘Safe Vehicles Save Lives’. As a charity working on the frontline, we very much appreciate the impact that incidents on the roads have on our patients, their families, and loved ones. Our teams respond to these incidents every day of the week, aiming to deliver the most cutting-edge critical care available anywhere in the world.

Critical care paramedic and clinical manager at EHAAT, Jakob Humphrey, said, ‘There is an irony in the job that we do, that we wish that we never needed to be dispatched, because prevention of severe injury is the key. However, when we do, we’re always trying our very best to get to patients as quickly as possible to help them. The messaging this year from Brake is relevant to everyone and we really hope that our roads become increasingly safer so that our patients are never patients in the first place’’.

Our teams at EHAAT recognise that the spectrum of injuries that result from road traffic collisions are entirely different from those seen years ago. Vehicle design and safety systems continue to improve as the motor vehicle industry strongly recognises that we all want to keep the occupants of our vehicles safe, whether this is our children, family members, or other road users and pedestrians. As well as cars, safety systems available for motorcyclists have been transformed in recent years. This means that we are all now more equipped than ever to keep each other safe. Despite this, because we are tasked to the most severe of incidents, our critical care doctors and paramedics still regularly help at the scenes of tragic events at the roadside, daily.

Associate Medical Director at EHAAT, Dr Gareth Grier said, ‘’The more significant the exchange of energy during a collision, the more severe are the injuries that are sustained by the occupants and by those struck by the vehicle. This is an irrefutable fact. The impressive designs of vehicles now mean that many road deaths are preventable. Of course, safety systems are still dependent on us as humans to play our part in making sure they can work well. We still see patients who die or whose lives are changed forever because of a lack of a simple measure such as wearing a seatbelt or a helmet. While we push all the stops out to help, no matter how cutting edge our medical interventions are, they will only ever go so far’’.

Thank you to everyone who is working towards making our roads even safer for our friends, families and communities, including Safer Essex Roads Partnerships and Hertfordshire Road Safety Partnership.

BACK TO BLOGS