Severe head injuries are one of the most prominent causes of deaths in Tamale in the northern region as a result of road traffic accidents. Fractures and head injuries are among the top five admissions at the Tamale Teaching Hospital and among the top three causes of deaths in the metropolis for the past three years.
Most commonly, the victims are individuals who violate road traffic regulations and ride motorbikes without wearing the crush helmets.
The Director of Medical Affairs at the Tamale Teaching Hospital, Dr Adam Atiku, who confirmed this to THE CUSTODIAN, disclosed that the victims are mostly within the ages of 18 to 26 years.
He said the victims after sustaining the head injuries would usually report to the hospital in a very bad state, and managing such injuries, he noted, requires a lot of resources and technical skills.
Almost 40 percent of patients at the emergency ward of the Tamale Teaching Hospital are there because of road accidents.
“So the mortality rate for head injuries is quite high” he emphasized, appealing therefore to the general public that, it is for their own good that the Ghana Police Service are enforcing the motor traffic rules and regulations in the area.
The Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) of the Ghana Police Service in the northern region last year arrested unregistered motorcycles and motor riders without crush helmets.
This was a collaboration between the police, the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) and the Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) to enforce the Road Traffic Regulation 2012 (L.I 2180).
Dr Atiku intimated that the nation is losing the younger generation to road accidents who should have either be in school at the university level or joining the country’s labor market to increase productivity.
“If you look at the data, most of them are between the ages of 18 to 26 years, so it means that, we’re losing a lot of our young people who are supposed to be in schools, the universities or they should be working but then they are coming in with fractures, they are losing their limps”.
The Director of Medical Affairs was speaking on the sidelines of the 2021 Annual Performance Review Meeting of the Tamale Teaching Hospital on Wednesday (March 16, 2022).
He further made a passionate appeal to the public to develop the culture of wearing the crush helmets for their personal safety when riding.
He lamented close to one thousand people die annually after they sustain head injuries through road traffic accident in recent years.
“We are appealing to the general public that wearing of crush helmets is very important. If you look at the numbers, a year, close 1000 people will die from head injuries through road traffic accidents and this has been so for the past three years” he reiterated.
Dr Adam Atiku asserted that, “even if you recover from head injury you may not be the same person and it is very important that we get this information across that wearing crush helmet is very important”.
