ThaiHealth joins hands with partners to reduce accidents and promote road safety
Thai Health Promotion Foundation (ThaiHealth) has joined hands with its strategic partners in an effort to cut down accidents – especially those occurring to motorcyclists – and promote road safety throughout the year by rushing to make risk hotspots in every sub-district safer.
Nov 13, 2020 – The Thai Parliament organised a meetup of representatives from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Thai government, Road Safety Fund, Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation, Office of Insurance Commission, National Institute for Emergency Medicine, Road Safety Network, and ThaiHealth. The seminar on road safety was organised to commemorate the Road Safety: World Day of Remembrance which falls on the third Sunday of November annually.
President of the Thai National Assembly, Mr Chuan Leekpai, said that this year’s number of casualties caused by road accidents up to November 10 accounted to 840,000 cases and the fingers are pointing to “lacking of discipline”. The statistics are ranked among the world’s countries with the biggest number of road accidents, and it can be employed as the principal index in measuring Thailand’s quality of life, which he viewed it as not a big and worrisome subject because Thailand still has a lot of national agenda to boast.
Thailand has been successful in enforcing laws prohibiting smoking in public places, air-conditioned spaces, and restaurants, which greatly reduces the number of smokers. This is the token of success, indicating that Thai people are sufficiently disciplined. Mr Chuan also added that if discipline is the key to the problem, Thailand will successfully reduce the number of road accidents if disciplines are taught since childhood.
Senator and President of the Integrative Committee Emergency Rescue and Road Safety, Mr. Surachai Liangboonlertchai, said that the main objective of this seminar was to exchange views and working experiences in dealing with road safety issues and challenges in the senate’s work in the past year, while proposing updates on the world’s direction on successful measures to reduce road accidents. The seminar also aimed at seeking cooperation between Members of Parliament and the Senate in its future work to minimize these casualties.
ThaiHealth CEO, Dr Supreda Adulyanon, said that road fatality is ThaiHealth’s top priority as seen by the organisation’s continuous work since 2003. ThaiHealth has been supporting in the form of information, policy and regulations, and public relations. It is now clear that there is no official agency in charge of the road accident problem-solving effort. Therefore, the government is pushing to set up the centre of information and legal amendment to better serve the modern world’s requirement.
At the same time, we have seen in the past two years the great effort to reduce road accidents especially those occurred among motorcyclists and young motorists by trying to reduce risk hotspots in every district and sub-district, while injecting public relations through several projects initiated by ThaiHealth and its strategic partners.
WHO Representative to Thailand, Dr Daniel Kertesz, said this seminar is a great leap of strategic planning in road accident reduction. He praised the importance of the Parliament for its good role in making this solution sustainable, referring to the world ministerial meeting on road safety initially held in Stockholm, Sweden, required that each country would have to enforce measures in order to reduce the number of road accidents by 50% between 2021 to 2030.
He also added that the stimulants are needed to accelerate the planned procedures with a grand progress of law enforcing and initiating Safe System, with support from the World Health Organisation in terms of policy and techniques.
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