History
In January 2013, a team from Bangladesh and the United States with expertise in emergency medicine, public health, mobile health and technologies, medical education, and social organizing began investigating the feasibility of implementing a community-based trauma first-aid program using trained volunteers to provide free emergency care at the crash scene.
We held numerous meetings with Bangladeshi organizations involved in road safety and volunteerism and spoke with academic researchers and local community members including government officials, police, fire services, public hospital staff, and religious leaders. These conversations were invaluable in developing and refining the operational model, and the open, trusting, and respectful relationships created in the process were essential in strengthening widespread and lasting support for the initiative.
The dangers to road users on the major highways and lack of services for traffic injury victims were widely acknowledged, and people usually did not have ready access to phone numbers for police or fire services. We therefore used the information and feedback we received to develop a program suited to local conditions in Bangladesh, rapidly connecting injured victims with first aid at the crash scene and transportation to the hospital.
In November 2014 we formally launched our pilot on a 14 km section of the Dhaka-Chattogram Highway, and have since expanded our operations to 249 km on 3 national highways, with 1,000 active volunteer first responders. All participating communities have shown a high level of acceptance and dedication to the program, evidenced by high volunteer recruitment and retention rates, and a 100% incident response rate.
Future Directions
Our goal has always been to prove the effectiveness of the model in Bangladesh, and to let this program serve as a model for projects in other developing nations facing similar challenges on their roads. This model for rapidly dispatching trained first responders holds promise for a broad range of emergency conditions and, as we seek to expand, the scale of our services, we are also looking ahead to providing a broader level of patient care as the program evolves over time.
On 19 May 2024 we spearheaded a pilot program to teach Basic Life Support (BLS), to a select group of TraumaLink volunteers, that was carried out with support from the Noncommunicable Disease Control Program of the Directorate General of Health Services.
In Bangladesh, CPR is an important tool in addressing drowning, the leading injury-related cause of death among children 0-17, and this skill set is highly useful for resuscitating near-drowning victims. The program took place in Manikganj, along the Dhaka-Aricha Highway, and next to a major river that is prone to annual and widespread flooding. The goal for the BLS training was to demonstrate the proof of concept that it could be provided as a parallel service to our post-crash response program, utilizing the same infrastructure to dispatch volunteers.