Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-12-11-Speech-1-163"
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"en.20061211.16.1-163"2
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"Mr President, injuries can take or change a life in a split second. They can be accidental, inflicted or self-inflicted. Injuries cause the death of a quarter of a million people and result in 65 hospital admissions every year. The challenge, when dealing with something as widespread, serious and preventable as injury, is to save lives and preserve health. For that reason I felt both challenged and privileged to work on this report.
In this report, which particularly focuses on injury data collection, I have recommended that to promote safety and prevent injury we need better-quality data. It is not helpful in terms of prevention to know the overall number of road fatalities. We need to know what it was that made the fatal difference. Was it the condition or type of vehicle; was the victim the driver, a passenger or someone walking along the road; were drink, speed or bad weather conditions involved; what was the road like? That is the type of breakdown we need in every area of injury if we are going to save lives. We cannot hope to closely examine every injury but we should and must create a system of data collection that more closely examines the injury determinants of all fatal and seriously disabling injuries, to prevent them more effectively in the future.
That is my approach in the report, which the Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety strongly supported. Gathering such information may seem difficult, but in reality a great deal of information is already in place: insurance companies have detailed data on accidents; police have data on violent and self-inflicted harm. We must identify the experts in injury reporting and work with them to get the information that can be studied to truly prevent injuries and promote safety.
The Commission document allowed the injury and safety surveillance system a place within all future health programmes. That would surely allow the system funding, regardless of whether it proved effective or beneficial. We feel strongly that a real initiative to prevent injury and promote safety is so important that it needs to be put on its own stream within the health programmes. We need to think about that again in more detail when we consider the health programmes themselves. That means that this particular recommendation should not yet be linked to the health programmes but should be considered alongside them. That is why the Committee on the Environment took out all mention of health programmes from the document.
The Commission laid out seven priorities to which we have added injury and safety in the workplace, and we have also stressed domestic violence among women and children. One change I ask that we make is to take out Amendment 4, which we will vote on separately tomorrow. That suggests: ‘Domestic violence against women is the main cause of death and invalidity among women between the ages of 16 and 44.’ Domestic violence against women and children is clearly a crime and I strongly support amendments that have highlighted that. However, a recommendation to produce higher-quality data cannot itself include inaccurate data. The statistic this amendment presents on the main cause of death is inaccurate. As recently as October a Eurostat publication said that transport accidents and suicide were the main causes of death of women in that age group.
Because we want to make injury surveillance more comprehensive we include mention of risk-taking behaviour, drugs and alcohol, gender considerations, social and environmental condition. Self-harm is also emphasised because of its increasing incidence. We have also made additions to the list of high-risk groups to include the young, the elderly, disabled people and women. The list is not exhaustive.
I support the amendments on needle-stick injuries and injuries to healthcare workers. We know the solution to them. They are easily preventable and therefore completely inexcusable.
It is clear that injury places a heavy burden on the economy. For me, however, it is a question of injured people and their families. In my opinion, the real key to preventing injury and promoting safety is the value we place on the human person. If you have a Renaissance masterpiece you handle it with far more care than a magazine poster. We need to return again to people and their value as the central issue.
Some injuries will happen – we cannot prevent them all – but with better understanding of how they happen, resulting in safer products and practices, we can reduce their occurrence. However, we will not have a serious effect on the level of injury until people realise that every person matters and that the loss or disablement of even one person is a great loss to us all. When we understand that, we will treat each other and ourselves like the masterpiece that we are and we will realise our shared responsibility for each other’s safety. That is what is behind Amendment 21 and why I emphasise to the Commission that the tragedy of injury is so much more than the economic burden."@en1
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