The Importance of Driver’s Education from a Healthcare Perspective

I still remember the sights, the blood, the destruction, the senseless loss of life. As a volunteer in the emergency department of a level 1 trauma center, I often saw the bleak outcomes of distracted driving. Kids, with their whole lives ahead of them, having their dreams cut short because of a text message, snapchat, or notification. Looking away from the road for a short period of time can have disastrous effects for new drivers. Being new to the road, what may be a small distraction to an experienced driver, can lead to grave overcorrections and crashes for a new driver. This is why it is imperative to have programs like driver’s education to teach new drivers the importance of staying alert and safe on the roads.

Motor vehicle crashes come into the emergency department fairly often, usually just to double check that there aren’t hidden underlying injuries. For every mundane injury (that didn’t necessarily need to be taken to the emergency department), there is a matching trauma patient; their lives forever changed in a moment. Many of these patients have severe injuries due to not wearing a seatbelt, a simple and effective preventative measure of injury. Without a seatbelt, we see patients that have been ejected from vehicles, or patients that stayed in the vehicle, but hit the windshield glass at an extremely high rate of speed. These cases usually lead to complex, systemic injuries that take years, if not lifetimes, to heal. The act of buckling a seatbelt might seem like a small burden, or might not be “cool” in some groups, but I have seen the real-life examples of disaster that can result from not doing that simple act.

One of my first memories of being in a car accident involved sitting on a curb, surrounded by police and fire personnel, scared and disoriented. This accident occurred when I was six years old, the result of a teenager running a red light. They had gone through the light and t-boned my Mom’s car with me sitting in the back seat. I remember the feeling of chaos, of searching for my Mom in the crowd, of trying to understand what was fully happening. Firefighters on scene were extremely worried, because they saw my younger brother’s car seat in the back, but no baby could be found. Due to the amount of damage to the vehicle, they worried that the baby had been ejected out of the car, or was lodged somewhere within it. Luckily, we were actually on our way to pick up my brother from daycare when the accident occurred, so it was just my Mom and I in the car (as I had stayed home sick that day). The memory of that day always makes me consider how quickly an accident can happen. The other driver wasn’t impaired, they weren’t distracted, they were just a new driver and thought they could make the light. This is why it is important to teach driver’s education in a way that is defensive, but also considers others on the road. Being a defensive and safe driver is important in knowing when it is safe to slow down and speed up, or when you should be wary at an intersection.

The importance of seatbelt use and safe, defensive driving are key in keeping yourself and others safe on the road. Growing up, I lived in a small town nestled between two main highways to the Oregon coast. Both of these highways were old and rundown, filled with logging trucks and the zippy, little cars of tourists. At many points on these highways there are double yellow lines (meaning do not pass). Often, bad drivers (whether overly confident or ignorant to a fault) ignore these markers and choose to pass anyways. To give some idea of the road conditions, they are windy, narrow, and filled with pot holes (not a great environment to play speed racer). As you could expect, that means there are quite a few accidents on these highways. Sadly, many of them fatal. Being the closest fire department, my home town crew responds to all of these calls, pulling cars out of ditches, or using the jaws of life to extricate a survivor. It reached the point where my tiny one-stoplight town had to install a helipad to better patient outcomes and get them quickly to higher levels of care. This story, though tragic, is representative of the fact that successful drivers anticipate that other drivers may not always follow the rules of the road. Knowing enough to know when others might try to push the limits is a great benefit of having completed driver’s education. It is of great importance to know what to do and what not to do, but also what to do when others are going out of their way to do the wrong thing (as in the case of crossing the double yellow line). Seeing these cases is actually what inspired me to pursue nursing school. I wondered whether patient outcomes would have been better if there were a trained higher level of care close by in rural settings.

Coming from a healthcare background, and looking into the future of entering nursing school, I am not disillusioned to the amount of motor vehicle accident patients I will see. Given my experience with car accidents, and what I witnessed firsthand in my hometown, I know that vehicles are inherently dangerous, and misusing them can be at great cost. Educating new drivers to the risks of getting behind the wheel is a huge benefit of driver’s education. Teaching the importance of seatbelts, and that defensive, safe driving is key can unlock a new generation of safer drivers. I hope that in the future as a healthcare professional, I can personally see a decline in death and serious injury from motor vehicle crashes with the help of these lessons.