Diss. Umeå : Umeå University. Umeå medical dissertations. New series 951, 2005

The relevance of conducting this thesis is evident by the fact that bus and coach casualties have been "stubbornly stable" in Europe recent years and a need for investigating if a similar trend could be found in Sweden is therefore obvious. It was also important to add new knowledge to the bus and coach research in Sweden, since many areas were scarcely addressed. To describe bus and coach occupants' injuries, crash and injury mechanisms generated in a traffic environment based on data from the medical sector. Additional aims were to investigate the injury reducing effect of a 3-point belt, the effect of cross-winds, and crucial factors in the emergency- and rescue response. Material and methods: Injury data analyses were based on a complete ten-year medical data set from a catchment-area with about 130,000 inhabitants. A number of crash studies with the scope in different crash phases were conducted by applying and elaborating the Haddon matrix as a framework. An additional framework, Protocol for Major Incidents was used in order to investigate the emergency- and rescue response to a severe coach crash. Summarising chapter: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-482