 Hello everyone, I am Dr. Abhay Kamath speaking on behalf of Department of Otolary Baxillofacial Surgery at KMC Hospital's Mangalow. I am here before you to speak about the Road Safety Awareness Week which is being celebrated from 11th to 17th of January. The very purpose of celebrating this road safety awareness is to make sure that we educate ourselves and the people around us regarding the road safety and also to be or to be a road safety hero is something which is at most important as we need to educate people around us and from a maxillofacial perspective if I have to speak from 11th to 17th at KMC hospitals. We had an area of events which were organized. The first day marked the commemoration of the Road Safety Awareness Week where KMC hospitals along with the Mangalow Police Department as well as AOMSIs unveiled the poster at the Ambedkar Circle and also we had a pledge which was signed by the health care providers and the police department and all the ones who were there at that particular instance to be there for the celebration and everybody took a pledge as to they of the pledge was ranging from wearing a seat belt to wearing a helmet to not using alcohol during driving and caring for your fellow passengers and opposite passengers who are traveling in four wheelers or two wheelers. Now if you have a look at this Road Safety Awareness Week which is being celebrated globally or nationally the main goal is to decrease the amount of morbidity or mortality and when I speak with terms in terms of maxillofacial surgery when patients present to us in the emergency department all we stress upon or the first illicit history which is being elicited is to understand if the patient had worn a helmet or not because most of the times when there is a road traffic accident and if the driver and the pillion rider have worn the helmet the degree or impact of injury is lesser compared to those who have not worn the helmet. So why am I talking about this is because the amount of impact the person undergoes without a helmet is much more gross because it involves impact even to the cranium or the skull portion of the human body and there if there is a head injury the prognosis may or may not worsen over a period of time and to add on to this with the head injury comes the component of facial trauma as well hence keeping all this in mind when we look at patients who come to us in the emergency room we see a lot of bad facial trauma as well as a neurocranial injury where the prognosis over a period of time goes bad and these patients if not treated at the right time would undergo a residual deformity because of their underlying medical condition at that particular instance and then we would have to treat these patients from a maxillofacial perspective once they are fully fit or sane and once they are completely out of the confines of head injury or when they have recovered from their head injury status. So on this note with the celebration of the road safety awareness week the main intention is to educate and inform people as well as advocate for responsible, responsible driving and also to understand and engage in communities when we say engage in communities it is mainly to encourage schools, hospitals, colleges to make sure that the world of road safety awareness is spread support the victims and families in all means in terms of psychological help in terms of rehabilitation. So we at KMC have taken the stride in celebrating the road safety awareness week I request one and all to follow the road safety or the road driving awareness and also take a pledge to be safe on the roads and also render your driving as well as the pedestrians to be safer. Thank you and happy road safety awareness week.