Road crash studiesThe number of facial and dental injuries requiring operations under general anaesthetic following road traffic accidents (RTA) has fallen by 61 per cent since the introduction of the penalty points system, according to a study at two Dublin hospitals.
In the 12 months before the Government introduced the penalty points system on October 31st, 2002, 57 patients were operated on in St James's and Beaumont hospitals for maxillofacial injuries sustained in road crashes. For the 12 months immediately following the introduction of the system, just 22 patients needed such surgery.
"The changes that were noted in our study are very remarkable," said Dr Omar Hussain, a registrar in the oral and maxillofacial surgery department in St James's, who headed the research. "It is not by chance that these changes have occurred. It is as a direct result of the introduction of penalty points that we have seen fewer people come to us for operations to maxillofacial trauma following car crashes," he said.
The study, which is to be published in the British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, found that in the same period overall instances of trauma-related operations - not necessarily those resulting from RTAs - in the two hospitals actually increased from 451 to 468.
Dr Hussain said that anecdotal evidence would suggest that a possible cause for that rise is an increase in Dublin's population and a rise in the occurrence of interpersonal assaults.
In the six months after the points system was brought in, there were just 12 maxillofacial operations compared with 27 for the corresponding period the year before.
This figure fell further to 10 for the second six months compared with 30 for the same period before the points came in.
Interestingly, no changes were observed in the type of injuries that were sustained or the severity of those injuries.
"So there will always be people who speed, regardless of the law, but just the numbers of people doing it has definitely decreased," said Dr Hussain.
"We used to do at least one case with a neurosurgical team in St James's every 10 days [ resulting from an RTA]. Now on average we rarely do one more than every two months or so. When we noticed the fall-off, it made us think there might be a correlation with the penalty points so that is why we carried out this retrospective study," he said.
The study did not include those people who were presented at accident and emergency departments, unless they required surgery, and it only involved people with facial or dental injuries that required operations.
The most common injury from road accidents is broken limbs and other orthopaedic trauma. No study of the reduction or otherwise of those types of injuries since the introduction of penalty points has yet been carried out.
The study did find, however, that the number of patients requiring admission to the intensive care units and the average duration of that admission remained unchanged, as did the total length of hospital admission.