¿Why incident and not accident or accident in the field of Public Health and road safety in Colombia?

Abstract

Objective: To reflect on the semantic differences and how we refer to events resulting from road insecurity in the field of Public Health and road safety in Colombia.
Introduction: We constantly use the terms accident, incident and sinister as synonyms to refer to events resulting from road insecurity, ignoring their true meaning. By using these terms indiscriminately we incur error in interpreting the phenomenon analyzed.
Despite international advances since the 1990s that have recognized the preventable and avoidable nature of these events, the adherence of specialized public health media indicates that the term accident is erroneous and the subsequent alert from international organizations about the incorrect use of the word accident, ratified at ministerial-level summits, laid the groundwork for the analysis and interpretation of the phenomenon. Unfortunately, the limited linguistic depth of the Congress of the Republic of
Colombia coined the term accident in Law 769/2002, from which the norm is interpreted and offenders are sanctioned, this not only reflects a lack of alignment with international advances in public health and road safety, but also perpetuates misinterpretation that could affect the effectiveness of public policies.
Conclusion: Understanding of terminology related to road events has been significant, highlighting the preventable nature of these events. However, in Colombia, the indiscriminate use of terms persists, ignoring conceptual evolution and perpetuating the use of erroneous terms, especially "accident", as conceived by current legislation