Hospital-Based Case Series Analysis of Road Traffic Trauma Patients in Sri Lanka

Road traffic accidents claim many lives each year worldwide and cause significant disability among survivors. Resulting socioeconomic burden is severe in low- and middle-income countries. Global emphasis currently focuses on trauma education and prevention in addition to improving post-injury care. Sri Lankan government recently made compulsory legislation to improve the safety standards of imported motor vehicles. Such regulations would not directly protect vulnerable road users (VRUs) who form the main bulk of Sri Lankan and South Asian automobile trauma casualties. With the objective of reviewing the management outcome of automobile trauma in order to correlate the potential impact of new legislation on injury prevention, data of all admitted road traffic injury victims were audited for 2 months. Out of 473 eligible cases (332 (70.2%)—males; mean age 37.2 years), there were 14 (3%) fatalities. Of 459 (97%) survivors, 77 (16%) suffered major injuries. Twelve out of 14 (85.7%) fatalities, 64 of 77 (83.1%) survivors with major injuries and 263 of 382 (68.8%) cases of lesser injuries were VRUs ( p value = 0.02: chi-square). VRUs had a significantly higher mean Injury Severity Score (ISS) of 10.96 ± 8.43 SD than non-VRUs who had a mean ISS of 8.14 ± 6.04 SD ( p = 0.003: t test). Among all survivors, 33/39 (84.6%) with permanent disability, 95/110 (86.4%) with temporary disability and 199/310 (64.2%) with no residual disability were VRUs ( p value