Role of NGOs in Road Injury Prevention
Role of community campaigning and voluntary sector in the road injury prevention
The society serves as an association of numerous individuals joined utilizing a mutual agreement to govern, deliberate and act supportively for communal purposes like road injury prevention.
Last year, in May, the United Nation has announced the first-ever universal Time of Action for Street Safety. They launched events in about one hundred countries involving Muppets, NGOs, sports stars, celebrities, and government. They promoted a common goal of stabilizing and reducing the number of road injuries and deaths through the global idea for road safety. They organized the event with the aim of safeguarding five million lives or more injuries by the end of 2020.
The World Health Organization has estimated that there are about 1.3 million road deaths and around 20 to 50 million injuries happening globally every year. It is actually a rough figure and acute figure will be identified soon. Also in the United Kingdom, the government has been collecting similar information for decades. There is a response of a big inconsistency between the published road injury figures, hospital admissions figures and collected by police.
Just like other big killers in the world, road crashes unreasonably affect the young. It means many people have lost their lives due to road crashes. Apart from crashes, it also has resulted in long term pain, worsened trauma for the grieving, and debilitating injuries.
How NGO helps in road injury prevention
The society registration act permits the registration of bodies involved in the assistance of society- health, employment, education, etc. They use various means to campaign effectively and efficiently as possible with their limited resources and make use of media work. Though they do not have many funds for advertising campaigns at the national level, they have the experience and sources to deliver high impact, high profile PR campaigns through utilizing social media and engaging traditional media.
To get the widespread coverage, the NGO utilizes reviews into road user understanding, behaviors, and attitudes. They give information regarding cycling and walking on the road, freedom of information requirements to the police forces, local and government authorities to learn about different road safety problems, after drink driving, morning driving, child car seating, and penalties for driving by unfollowing road safety rules. They associate the results to clear, constructive and particular educational messages. They often involve families that have been due to a particular kind of crash for support of their media work. They also work hard to involve contacts in specialist, regional and national media and to distribute the story through social media.
They use this formula as it works incredibly well for them. Apart from the PR activity and communicating policy and educational messages, they also work to lobby government, requesting for investment and legislative change in road safety by the direct arrangement of civil servants and government ministers, functioning with MP to assist bringing road safety rules in the parliament and by responding to new developments and proposals. Some of the examples include putting media statements and answering consultations. The NGO work more and more to trigger members of the community in lobbying like helping people to draft to their MP utilizing a bespoke application on the website.
The major UK policies focus on the NGO at the present moment are as follows
- Calling for a method of graduated driver authorizing to make sure novice drivers progress their experience and skills gradually at least to a minimum of one year learning period. Following, the novice driving time with risk dropping license restrictions such as late-night driving control.
- Requesting for a lesser drink-drive limit along with the fact that even fewer amounts of alcohol affect driving and enhanced drug and drink driving enforcement regime.
- They need lower speed limits along with other measures to reduce down traffic sounds especially to make roads harmless for people to cycle and walk- especially they prefer urban default limit reduced to 20 miles per hour and lesser limits of 50 miles per hour or less than that on rural roads, though with the current focus of the government on localism. They are concentrating on motivating them to encourage and enable local authorities to execute more reduced limits at the confined level.
