Why incident and not accident or incident in the field of public health and road safety in Colombia?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the semantic differences and how we refer to events resulting from road safety in the field of public health and road safety in Colombia. We constantly use the terms accident, accident and incident as synonyms to refer to events resulting from road safety, ignoring their true meaning. The indiscriminate use of these terms leads to a misinterpretation of the phenomenon under analysis. This error persists despite international advances that since the 1990s have recognized the preventable and avoidable nature of these events, the adherence of specialized public health media indicating that the term accident is erroneous, and the subsequent alert by international organizations on the erroneous use of the word accident, ratified at ministerial summits, laid the foundations for the analysis and interpretation of the phenomenon. Unfortunately, in the case of Colombia, the Congress of the Republic of Colombia coined the term accident in Law 769/2002, from which the law is interpreted, and offenders are sanctioned, which not only reflects a lack of alignment with international advances in public health and road safety but also perpetuates the misinterpretation that could affect the effectiveness of public policies. In conclusion, the understanding of terminology related to road events has been significant, highlighting the preventable nature of these events. However, indiscriminate use of terms persists in Colombia, ignoring conceptual evolution and perpetuating the use of misleading terms, especially ‘accident’, conceived from current legislation.