Statistics from motorbike accidents show the damages are deadlier than vehicle accidents
Dr. Henry Bulley, Emergency Medicine Specialist, Clinical Coordinator at Korle Bu, has refuted claims that persons involved in motorbike accidents to hospitals usually go back home with amputated limbs.
He explained that while the statistics show that the damages that are recorded from motorbikes outweigh those from vehicular carnages, it is not a yardstick for casualties from the former to undergo amputation.
Speaking during the first GhanaWeb Webinar series on Road Safety, as part of activities under its Road Safety Campaign project, he said that even more worrying are the numbers of people who have to stay back in hospitals after such crashes.
“I was following the data being given and what the public looks at is the number of people who have lost their lives but then the numbers suffering inside the hospitals, most of the time are forgotten. If you put all this data together, everybody will be surprised.
“Now, you’ll be surprised that we’ll have a vehicle accident where you’ll have a lot of victims. Then you have a motorbike accident that has only four people involved and the damage of the motorbike accident is so huge but in most cases, the damage exceeds those of the vehicles themselves,” he said.
Dr. Henry Bulley also stated emphatically that nobody has their limbs amputated just by coming to the hospital with an accident from a motorbike.
“It’s so bad and terrible but there is no rule that anybody who has an accident with motorbike and comes into the hospital will have the limps amputated; we don’t do that. In the hospital, we don’t work with anger, we don’t work with hatred. Ours is to save human lives,” he stated.
The virtual conference included carefully selected stakeholders to discuss viable ways of curbing the road accident canker on Ghana’s roads.
It was on the theme, “Losing the road safety battle – what can be done now?”