I woke this morning to the news telling me that the last 12 months to end of May 2025 has had the highest statistics of road fatalities in 15 years. This is not surprising because since COVID we have had a steady increase each year. You may have heard we are not going to meet the Governments “Decade of Action on Road Safety 2021-2030” goal of a 50% reduction, making it 571 deaths a year, or at least in the year of 2030. The International Road Safety Conference I spoke at last October had many road safety professionals concerned this would be the case.
I note it here because the comments made by the community on reports such as Drive.com and Sky News, keep blaming the Government for not spending the money in the right places. But the truth of the matter is that road crashes are caused by the person in charge of the vehicle of transport – be it the car, motorbike or even feet. Sometimes it might be the pedestrian wearing black at night and not watching for traffic (though not always); many times, it is the driver of the car speeding or running the red light or not giving way to others. I am sure you see this on the road as much as I do. So, until humans are no longer at the wheel of heavy machinery like cars, we are likely to have crashes and fatalities. Since 1935 we have not lost less than 1000 people per year. Some say that’s a good statistic given how many more cars there are on the road. But I ask you, if your son or daughter, father, mother, husband, wife or partner was included in that statistic, would it be a “good statistic”?
The point that is missing, however, is that for every fatality, many people are hospitalized. I can’t find the stats for it now, but my memory tells me that for every death there are 30 seriously injured. That is 30 people who went to hospital. That does not include the many people, I am sure, who did not go to hospital, who’s car was injured physically but they were injured emotionally. And it is this reason that The Prepared Bystanders are needed. If my calculation is close to right, if 1337 people died on our roads in the 12 months to May 2025, then about 40,000 people were injured enough to go to hospital. That is over 100 a day, across Australia. What care did these people get before the Ambulance arrived? As best the care the first people on the scene could provide, I am sure. And who took care of that bystander when the medical help took over the casualty?
The Prepared Bystanders online community to designed to educate the active bystander in evidence based best care for the people involved in the road crash. By the nature of our design, we will also be able to support the person who provided that help, the bystander themself. Right now, these people, us, we have to take care of ourselves and seek out our own debrief of the incident or counselling. Once The Prepared Bystanders is out there, placing our arms around Australia, the mutual support our like-minded community provides, will take care of them. Thank you for your donation to this project and please help us by spreading the word about what we are doing, for the future of all road users, Australia-wide.
