One for the Roads

Article of the week. Coming to you on a Saturday and nit a Friday for no important reason.

Without wasting time with useless openers, I would like to share my thoughts on the situation on the roads in Malawi. You are right to think that this post was triggered by the major accidents that claimed a lot of lives last weekend. While that might be the case, the whole thing has just hammered a number of facts into memory.

The first of these is that of my current allocation as a Medical Doctor intern at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. I am currently working in the Department of Orthopedics and statistically over 90 percent of the patients present with fractures and most of them are sustained in road traffic accidents. The combination of the two have reminded me of how I made a presentation on the topic of road safety and levels of prevention of casualties in road accidents. While I can't remember much of the content, I do remember that part of it emphasized on the need for primary, secondary and tertiary prevention; concepts I will later relate to the current situation on the roads.

Most of the roads between and within our cities are not in good condition and they continually pose as threats to those travelling on them. In as much as there have been some maintenance work on our roads, the most notable of which was the Blantyre-Zomba road, efforts elsewhere have been below satisfactory. Allow me to not comment on the black paint people are smearing on the roads in area 24 in the name of putting up tarmac. The main point is that the potholes, lack of road signs, lack of rumble surfaces and other speed breakers and every other thing you know are putting lives of people at risk.

Next to the condition of the roads is the condition of the things that travel on the roads. A good proportion of the vehicles that are on our roads are not what you would call road worthy. One could also comment on the condition of the drivers as we still have this syndrome of drunk driving and people driving without valid driver's licenses.

The safety of the roads and vehicles aims at the prevention of the occurrence of accidents and thus falls in the category of primary prevention. It doesn't take a genius to know that we are lacking when it comes to enforcing the standards on this one. Without bothering with the mechanisms, I should point out that the rampant corruption that we have is leaving our roads in a bad state and leaving vehicles and drivers that are not road worthy on our roads. I could relate this to an accident or two. While I am pointing a blaming finger on those who are supposed to enforce such, I must also say that all of us have a role to play in taking care of ourselves in as far as road travel is concerned. We have a responsibility of taking care of our roads (probably by leaving the signs on them alone, perhaps). We probably don't have Richie Online people who intentionally damage signs or anything on the roads. What we have are people who have cars and the potential to buy cars in the next few years. Word to you is that you should buy the best of cars and make sure that you have the necessary qualifications for driving.

The next levels of prevention have something to do with what happens when we have failed to prevent an accident. This is something to do with the medical response aimed at preventing loss of life and later loss of function in people involved in accidents. I would not say that we are doing that badly, but at the end of the day, there is lot of improving that we could do.

To begin with, the concentration of hospitals with the capacity to respond to road traffic accidents is not that good. When an accident happened at Manjawira, for example, people were rushed to Balaka. For the love of everything good, there should have been some place nearer for the people to go. It might have been a different case for the Magalasi accident, with Queens being around the corner.On the other side of it, however, Queens is supposed to be a referral hospital and it shouldn't have been involved in the dressing of wounds and the sorting of the minor injuries everyone else presented with. Some of you may not understand this but this is where certain groupings would begin to ask as to why no one has ever talked of something like Blantyre District Hospital or something similar in Zomba. Ultimately, even if we had the district hospital in Ndirande, some patients would have ended up at Queens but the load would not have been that overwhelming. This is all probably too technical and unnecessary, but at the end of the day the point that we need good hospitals with adequate emergency response services still stands.

Prevention of loss of function is also another important factor. We probably need more specialists and donations for that. Better not talk about it.

Away from the technical issues of safety, there is something wrong with the way messages about these accidents are thrown around. The moment an accident happens we all get to have a set of 13 pictures from the scene in our Whatsapp groups from church, work, former school, drinking group and every other group. There is probably nothing wrong with that but some of the picture tend to be too informative. Know what people do? Throw around pictures of headless bodies without any remorse at all. I wonder if people even think of the dignity of those who lose their lives in that nature before sharing. I personally wouldn't want my pictures plastered all over every Whatsapp group if I got involved in an accident and ended up seriously injured or dead. It's simply immoral and on top of that people do get disturbed with such images. I am sure we have people on Richie Online who go around throwing such images. That's a bad habit and it has to stop. NOW!

Signing off...

Someone defined an accident as some unforseen and undesirable event. While that might be the case, there have been some accidents that have been orchestrated by human carelessness. That being the case, we all need to take part in the active prevention of accidents in a bid to complement the efforts that are already there to curb loss of life due to accidents. Pamseu sipofera.