Why the Prominent Improvement in Prehospital Medical Response in Iran Couldn’t Decrease the Number of Death Related Road Traffic Injuries

Copyright: © 2012 Khankeh HR, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Road Traffic Injuries (RTIs) are still a major public health problem especially in lowand middle-income countries [1]. It caused more than 1.27 million deaths and almost 50 million injuries every year worldwide. For reduction of their consequences it required concerned efforts both for crash prevention and improvement in post crash management [2,3]. Iran ranks as one of the highest mortality rates of RTIs in middle-income countries. Focusing on post crash event, studies in Iran have shown that about 60% of the deaths use to be occurred at the crash scene or during transporting to hospital [2], but the pattern was changed in recent year and about 40% of the deaths occur in the pre-hospital phase. Changing in this pattern may because of pre-hospital medical response capabilities in recent years and a dramatically improvement in this area including staff training and their skill as well as ambulance number and ambulance dispatch sites and their equipments [4]. Despite these efforts, mortality and morbidity of RTIs has not shown a noticeable decrease [2].