Vehicle rescue sheets : opportunities and barriers in the South African context

Abstract

Motor vehicle crashes are a major cause of road related human suffering. The latest WHO statistics (2023) quote 1.19 million fatalities and between 20 and 50 million injuries, globally, each year. While the Safe Systems Approach (WHO and UN, 2021) focusses on five pillars (users that may make mistakes, multimodal transport and land-use planning, road and roadsides, vehicle and speeds, as well as post-crash care), attention to each pillar differs significantly, not only in research, but also in practice. Research regarding entrapment in vehicles after road crashes is quite limited, even internationally. According to Nutbeam et al. (2021), up to 40% of road crash related hospital patients were trapped in their vehicles, prior to trauma transport and hospitalisation. There is a phenomenon in trauma care known as the ‘Golden Hour’, which is commonly used to characterise the urgent need for the care of trauma patients. This term implies that morbidity and mortality are affected if care is not instituted within the first hour which occurs immediately after injury (Lerner and Moscati, 2001; Vanderschuren and McKune, 2015). Hence, patients who are trapped have worse outcomes than those who are not trapped, due to prolonged times at the scene. In some countries, such as Germany and Spain, rescue sheets have been introduced to speed up the extraction process of trapped road crash victims. Rescue sheets provide information about vehicle safety functions, such as disconnecting the high voltage and other potential risk components in the crashed vehicle, such as batteries, fuel/gas tanks, airbags, gas generators, gas struts, as well as vehicle structure reinforcements. This information is provided by the manufacturers to speed-up the rescue process. Their aim is to help the first and second responders to make their rescue steps easier and quicker. Since their introduction in the 2000’s, with the support of automobile clubs in some European countries, the rescue sheets are standardised, since 2015 (ISO 17840), and offered in a form of a free mobile App called Euro Rescue, launched in collaboration with CTIF and Euro NCAP. This paper provides an indication of the entrapment risk, as well as opportunities and barriers to the introduction of rescue sheets, in the South African context.