Recently through my internship I
got to see a presentation through the company Parachute (formerly SmartRisk.)
The presenter, Dr. Philip Groff was presenting to us about injury prevention.
I know what you’re thinking,
snorefest. Why would you want to go through a presentation on injury
prevention; you might as well just stick a hot poker in your eye. Dr. Groff
however, brought up some really interesting
opinions about society as a whole (giving he’s an educated psychologist, it’s
not really that big of a surprise.) So throughout the entire presentation I
pulled some life lessons and they are:
Prevention isn’t
sexy, cures and emergencies are sexy: As a society we don’t focus on
prevention, we highlight cures and emergencies. Cures and emergencies are white
medical coats running down a hospital hallway in slow motion yelling “Stat!
Paddles! Charge to 300!” Prevention is often looked at as those stupid WHMIS
training videos you had to watch EVERY time you started a new job and lifting
with your knees. Dr. House and Grey’s Anatomy don’t make episodes on
prevention, they make shows on curing and fixing.
“Accident” is a
copout word: When we refer to something as an accident we’re already accepting
the fact that it happened and moving on. Don’t get me wrong, moving on is good,
but what are we going to do to prevent it from happening in the future? A
driver falls asleep at the wheel and it’s labelled and accident and you may see
a bit more on the news about taking breaks while driving, but life goes back to
normal. In fact, other than a few PSA’s the most awareness I’ve seen about an
issue like distracted driving is an insurance commercial, and they’re telling you
they’ve got you covered in case of an “accident.” Anything other than accident
implies someone was at fault and when it’s a mistake we’re not apt to do that.
No prevention = big
$$: This was something I wasn’t
aware of. Preventable injuries cost the healthcare system around $8.7 BILLION
dollars. Not hundred thousand, not million, BILLION. We’re syphoning money into
treating injuries that are almost always preventable. Not only do they cost
money, they cost lives. Preventable injuries kill around eight thousand
Canadians per year and injure roughly 2.2 million. It’s a billion dollar issue,
so why are only the insurance companies really focusing on it? A huge thing
that I learned that I would not have been aware of is just how misinformed we
are; take for example childproof lids. They aren’t designed to be childproof,
that just refers to the length of time it takes until the child can get the lid
open.
It’s not about
telling people don’t do stupid shit: People do dumb shit, the Darwin awards
wouldn’t exist if we didn’t. Obviously, telling people “don’t be an idiot” isn’t
an effective strategy or we wouldn’t have injury prevention costing billions of
dollars a year. People still do dumb stuff, but it’s making them aware of the
cost and repercussions of their decisions that needs to happen.
To sum up, preventable injuries
will always exist. It’s a fact of life, we’re human we’re not the most
coordinated species in the universe; however we don’t need to be billions of a
dollars of uncoordinated. More efforts need to be put in place to talk about
preventing injuries and not just treating them. Accident needs to stop being a
copout phrase and there needs to be accountability, not to point fingers at
people and make them terrible human beings, but to show that things are
preventable. We need to bring the sexy back into injury prevention. Justin
Timberlake, you’re on it!
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