ACT fire and rescue, paramedics, police and the Canberra Hospital staff implore safer road behaviour

These are the dozens of badly injured and broken bodies and the emotional trauma felt by families, friends - and the first-responders.

Registered nurse Georgia Gotts, from the ACT Trauma Service at the Canberra Hospital, watches the gurneys roll in and out of the Emergency Department every shift.

And behind the injured arrive the overwrought families.

"This year, in particular, we've seen a lot more major trauma in our hospitals, a lot longer stay [for these patients] in hospital and a lot more requirements of long-term rehabilitation and referrals to life-long care for our patients," she said.

"I spend a lot of time working in the intensive care unit when the family members see their loved ones [for the first time] on life support with breathing tubes," she said.

"The patients don't look like they normally look. It's very confronting.

"It's not uncommon for them [the family members] to drop to their knees and bellow in anguish."

Even among those hospital staff who see major trauma every day, that level of anguish "ripples throughout the unit and takes everyone's breath away for a minute".

And so many of those road trauma patients, she said, were young men, their lives changed in a heartbeat of poor decision-making.

Canberra's road toll for 2022 currently sits at 18, the highest in 12 years. With two full months of the year still ahead - combined with the busy pre- and post-Christmas road travel period to come - first-responders hold grave concerns that without significant changes to ACT road user attitudes and behaviour, this trauma will continue.

Representatives from ACT police, ambulance paramedics, fire and rescue and the hospital came together on Friday to implore the Canberra community, in a combined appeal, for road users to slow down and take more care.

Commander Guy Cassis, from ACT Fire and Rescue, believed education about safe road behaviour had to start in the home and in the family car.

"Children model their behaviour from their parents," he said.

"It speaks to parents displaying behaviours that are appropriate when they are driving and when they've got kids in the car, because those kids will one day get their learners' [licence] and do their driving but they've already picked up on what they've already seen [from their parents]. That's why it [road safety] is everybody's responsibility.

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"We can only do so much from our perspective, but everyone's got to step up to the plate."

First-responders have seen some awful road crashes in the ACT this year, including those resulting in the deaths of seven drivers and six passengers. Police who investigate these incidents say many are attributable to excessive speed.

Among the first-responders who arrive to find these confronting scenes of smashed-up cars and mangled human bodies, behind the professionalism of their response, there's an unseen legacy on their own emotional wellbeing. Only when they "take a breath after a job" does that slow build-up of personal trauma begin.

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