Improvements in medical care and technology and reductions in traffic-related fatalities in Great Britain

proxies used to measure medical care and technology improvements have had a smaller effect
with the ratio model showing somewhat larger estimated changes.

To put these results in context, the total reduction in fatalities was about 2100 over
this time period (for the 9 regions). Therefore, medical technology improvements may be
accounting for nearly one-third of this reduction. While these results strongly support the
hypothesis that changes in medical care and technology have played an important role in
reducing traffic-related fatalities, it is also possible that the technology improvements are
merely delaying death. If technology manages to keep seriously injured victims alive beyond
the 30 day threshold for being counted as a traffic-related fatality, then this effect would be
picked up our analyses as a reduction in deaths (as well as in the national statistics).
Broughton (2000), however, found that over 80% of deaths occur in the first 24 hours and
only about 1% of deaths occur after the 30 day cut-off point. While beyond the scope of this
analyses, increased ability to defer death from serious injuries would clearly imply that the
definition of what is considered a traffic-related fatality should change.

Conclusions

The work presented here has used various proxy variables to represent changes in
medical care and technology and has estimated models that demonstrate an effect on traffic-
related fatalities. The three variables used were the average length of inpatient stays in the
hospital, which has declined over time representing improvements in treatment; the per-capita
NHS staff, which would represent the level of resources devoted to medical care; and, the
per-capita number of people waiting for hospital treatment, which also proxies for the level of
resources put into medical care. Of these three proxy variables, the first is representative of
changes in medical technology while the latter two represent changes in medical care.
Results suggest that the medical technology improvements seem to be more important than
the changes in medical care.

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