Trends and projections of vehicle crash related fatalities and injuries in Northwest Gondar, Ethiopia: A time series analysis

Background: Road traffic crashes are a huge public health and development problem in Ethiopia. Its current situation requires a high level political commitment, immediate decisions and actions in order to curb the growing problem. Materials and Methods: Data on fatalities, total and partial permanent injuries, and lost workday attributable to vehicle crashes were collected from North Gondar Traffic Offices from 1996 to 2011. Holt and Brown exponential smoothing techniques were used to model the number of fatalities and other injuries due to vehicle crashes. Results: There were 2300 vehicle crashes that occurred from 1996 to 2011 causing an estimated 968 fatalities, 1665 lost workday and 1185 permanent total and partial injuries, and 1,899,950.60$ losses. Only 7.6% of the vehicles had problems before the crashes occurred while 89.9% had no problems. The mean time of crashes occurred were 12.78 h with a standard deviation of 4.19 h. The highest daily, monthly, seasonal, and yearly crashes occurred were during Friday, January, winter and 2009, respectively. Future forecasts showed that by 2015, there could be 414 fatalities, 1123 lost workdays and 438 permanent total and partial injuries, and 955,249.12$ losses. Conclusion: The numbers of lives lost and disabilities due to vehicle crashes indicated an upward trend in the last decade showing future burden in terms of societal and economic costs threatening the lives of many individuals. Surveillance systems that could enable to monitor patterns of vehicle crashes with preventive strategies must be established.