Austrian Action Plan for Unintentional Injury
Risks of accidents are omnipresent in any human society, absolute safety is not possible. However, far higher levels of safety can be achieved without relevant losses of benefit of actions, products or systems. More safety is possible, affordable and acceptable. More than that, there is a large gap between the levels of safety today and the levels of safety that could and should be reached.
After the encouraging suggestions of the 7th World Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion, which was held 2004 in Vienna, the Austrian Federal Minister for Health and Women Maria Rauch-Kallat set the public health target of lowering the mortality rate for injuries by 25 per cent by 2010. Austrian experts were summoned to develop a national action plan aiming to achieve this goal. KfV (Austrian Road Safety Board) has been asked by the Federal Ministry for Health and Women to assist on this project.
In June 2006, at the first European Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion, a draft of the "Austrian Programme for the Prevention of Unintentiojnal Injuries 2006-2010" was presented. Austria is the first European country with such a national action plan - for this reason, Austria plays a leading role in Europe.
