Emergency responders in the ACT are calling for a "reset" of driver attitudes to combat the worst road toll for the territory in 12 years.
Representatives from ACT police, fire and rescue, Canberra Hospital's trauma unit and ACT Ambulance service gathered together on Thursday to make a collective, impassioned plea for a change in driver behaviour ahead of Sunday's global Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims.
A video has been developed which will be posted widely across social media platforms on Sunday, November 20. It is the first time all the ACT emergency services have combined their voices in a single online campaign of this type.
The ACT's road toll currently sits at 18, and a further death occurred last week just nine kilometres north of the Canberra border when a 28-year-old man, driving an ACT-registered Ford Falcon station wagon, was killed in a head-on collision with a B-double truck.
The Falcon driver was on the wrong side of the Federal Highway when the impact occurred but how or why his vehicle was there is yet to be determined.
Those professionals whose task it is to respond to these repetitive horrific incidents and treat those who are injured all hold concerns about the weeks ahead leading into the busy Christmas-New Year driving period.
The conundrum for those who study these incidents and seek to pinpoint specific behaviours or issues which could be targeted are at a loss to explain why so many people are dying in such high numbers on ACT roads this year.
The 2022 toll year to date includes six drivers, seven passengers, a motorcycle rider, cyclist, an e-scooter rider and a pedestrian. Prevailing road and weather conditions at the times of these incidents have varied from poor to near perfect.
Commander Guy Cassis from ACT Fire and Rescue said one reason for the spike in road trauma could be road users are rejoining the road now after almost two years of the COVID lockdown period and border closures. Traffic volumes declined significantly during the COVID period as people worked from home and restricted their normal road travel.
"We're all coming back together after a period when we've had long periods of lockdowns across the states and territories and maybe that's resulted in a little bit of just not being familiar with used to having so many people around us on the roads," he said.
"When you think about that, it's like a reset.
"It's about driving to the [road] conditions, and one of those conditions is having a lot more people [around you] on the road.
"So slow down, put some distance between yourself and the driver ahead of you, don't get distracted, and definitely don't drive under the influence of drugs or alcohol."
While the current ACT road toll of 18 delivers a stark warning, undisclosed and hidden is the road trauma numbers - those people who are severely injured and had their lives changed forever by a road crash.
Dr Ailene Fitzgerald, a trauma surgeon for almost a decade and the director of Canberra Hospital's ACT Trauma Service, acknowledged what Canberra has seen this year in road trauma represents just a proportion of what has happened beyond its borders.
Canberra Hospital is the major trauma treatment centre for a huge portion of southern NSW, extending to the far South Coast, south to Mildura on the Victorian border, north beyond Young and west of Hay.
Drivers and passengers from country NSW are vastly over-represented in the latest crash data compiled by NSW Transport. Just as the ACT has seen a spike in road deaths this year, so too has NSW, with 256 people killed on NSW roads year to date, 20 more than for the same period last year.
Any people badly injured in major road accidents across a vast swathe of southern NSW invariably end up in the ACT trauma wards and in the hands of Dr Fitzgerald's eight trauma specialists and three trauma case managers, as well as a host of junior doctors and nursing staff.
"The 18 roads deaths is for ACT roads but [in road trauma treatment] there's a lot more that we're involved with from NSW," she said.
"We're the major trauma service for our region; roughly about 50 per cent of our [trauma] patients are NSW-based but you have to bear in mind that a lot of those [injured] are ACT residents."
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