Improving Road Safety
in the OIC Member States
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room injury surveillance systems (OSAC Country Council Information, 2014). The country has
limited resources to deal with road crash victims. There are no dedicated trauma teams for road
crashes and these are treated as any other emergency patients in hospitals which are equipped
with emergency care or special trauma units. Not all hospitals have these facilities nor do all
ambulance services have specialised and trained trauma team personnel.
An emergency centre (with its own emergency call number) has been established in Yaounde
and is the only specialised emergency centre in the country equipped to deal with trauma
patients. However, even this centre has inadequate specialised trauma resource capacity to deal
with the large numbers of traffic crash victims and the geographic area affected by crashes. In
the last year the centre dealt with 8226 trauma cases, 41% of which were victims of road
crashes. The majority of victims were males aged 21-40 years old. Injuries are typically lower
limbs injuries (40%), chest injuries (28%) and head injuries (16%). The majority of injuries
(60%) are related to fractures and lacerations. Many of the victims are reputedly either
pedestrians or passengers/drivers of motorcycle taxis.
According to the centre a major problem in admitting patients is the lack of personal
identification and proof of insurance. Patients may not be admitted unless there is some surety
regarding the payment of treatment. In many cases this cannot be established and since medical
insurance is not compulsory, is not possible to immediately admit all patients. This results in
average admission times of 9 – 16 hours and in extreme cases up to 72h. Prior to admission,
patients are afforded basic emergency care.
There are no records of response times following a call to a crash. The Emergency Centre has
only two ambulances and given this limited resource, response times cannot be guaranteed and
are not monitored.
Reports of road crashes are channelled mainly through several informal and unstructured
media. Currently, only one toll free emergency line is designated for crash/incident reporting.
Government has created a National Committee to follow up road crash victims but this is still
not operational.
10.9 Data Collection and Accident Reporting
Currently Cameroon has no reliable database on road traffic crashes and there is no centralised
information system containing data on road crashes, victims and the road environment. Each
organisation dealing with road crashes has developed their own registration system and each of
these manage these data according to their own needs. There are obvious differences between
the systems and all have certain shortcomings. Whether data on urban crashes is accessed via
the National Police or the hospitals, the quality of the rough data is not reliable enough to use
for road safety analyses. The current road safety performance statistics (outcomes) are
primarily based on data centrally recorded by the National Gendarmerie on the intercity road
network. However, also the National Police record crash data and are responsible for registering
crashes in the urban areas of the country. The Police also record crash data via crash report