March 2006 ISSUE
An Injury Wake-up Call
Alberta’s foremost expert in safety and injury prevention is coming to an APEGGA Annual Conference lunch — and he’ll be serving up a heaping meal of reality. “I am looking forward to coming and sharing some cold, hard truth with you and your members,” Dr. Louis Francescutti, MD, PhD, told The PEGG.
He speaks at the APEGGA Annual Conference lunch on Friday, April 21, in Edmonton.
The day before, the lunch speaker is Scott Taylor, a Canadian war correspondent
who was held hostage in Iraq.
Dr. Francescutti is a native Montrealer who came west, fell in love with the
open space and clear blue skies of Alberta — and never left.
He has worked as an emergency medical technician in the Arctic and as a professional
photographer with a studio in Old Montreal. Dr. Francescutti completed
his MD and PhD at the University of Alberta and, while training as a resident
in general surgery, became interested in the field of injury control.
He founded the Injury Prevention Centre at the University of Alberta Hospitals
and developed the award-winning multimedia injury prevention program for teenagers
called HEROES.
He has trained at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health in Baltimore where he completed his master’s degree in public health and a preventive medicine residency while pursuing further studies in injury control and public health.
He is an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta, and is currently developing an electronic injury surveillance system and community-based centres for injury control and research.
Dr. Francescutti works as an emergency physician at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, and he is the director of the Alberta Centre for Injury Control and Research.
A Q-and-A with Dr. Francescutti follows.
Q What message do you have
for members of APEGGA that they haven’t
heard before or perhaps aren’t ready to hear?
A Alberta is doing terribly when it comes to reducing injury.
There seems to be very little will power to make a difference.
Q Protection of the public is paramount at APEGGA, because we regulate the engineering and geoscience professions. What can our members do to make the world a safer place?
A Take the injury problem far more seriously. Understand the issues and become advocates for change.
Q You are quite consistently referred to as a crusader. Is that what you are? Is it a description you’re comfortable with?
A I am better described as a visionary. Unfortunately, it is lonely at times seeing the problem so clearly and waiting for the world to catch up.
Q You’ve noted that accidents aren’t treated as a disease, and that research dollars tend to get funnelled by older men into the diseases they personally fear, such as cancer and heart disease. Do many of us have a misconception about risks and accidents? Why so?
A First of all they are not accidents, they are injuries. Injuries are a disease. Injuries kill more Albertans under the age of 44 than any other disease. Injuries are predictable and preventable. We have become habituated to injuries by the media. The media use the premise that if it bleeds then it leads. Every newscast and front page is always full of injury descriptions. We have become tolerant of them.
Q Are you being heard and are you optimistic that accident prevention will, more and more, be funded to the level it requires? Why is it that accidental injury and death have so much trouble grabbing the limelight? And is there some kind of misplaced machismo lurking behind all this (the kid without a helmet, the sour gas worker without a mask, the driver without a seatbelt)?
A We have a very primitive, redneck attitude in this province that has set our tipping point very high. I’ll bet a bus of workers coming home from Fort McMurray can crash and six men die and we still would do nothing. Wait a minute: that actually did happen and we did nothing.
Q Suicide is often mentioned in the same breath as accidental injury and death. Why is that?
A Suicide is an example of an intentional injury. More Albertans kill themselves than die in car crashes. We have a very serious problem when it comes to suicides in Alberta.
Q The advances in auto racing
safety — softer walls, head-and-neck
restraints, roof flaps — have been really significant in recent years.
Does this technology trickle down to the rest of us, and why do we accept a car
and highway that will kill us in a 60-m.p.h. impact — when auto racers
routinely survive 180-m.p.h.-plus impacts?
A Simple. We think we are better drivers than the next driver.
We have more knuckleheads on our roadways than I have seen in years and it looks
like it will get worse not better.
Q What gets you up in the morning? Why do you do this, what do you gain personally?
A So much yet remains to be done and I have long ago accepted that it takes 25 to 30 years to change society’s views on an issue and I am only in year 20 of this mission. I must simultaneously pace myself and run the race as a marathoner while sprinting occasionally.
The only personal gain is knowing that I helped to identify a previously unidentified epidemic of a disease that is both predictable and preventable.