Transport committee  Thank you so much for inviting me today. As mentioned, my name is Daniel Rosenfield and I'm a pediatric emergency specialist at SickKids hospital in Toronto, where I completed training in additional trauma care and injury prevention. I'm here today representing the Canadian Paedi

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  It's important to distinguish between passengers in the bus and passengers outside the bus. The vast majority of fatalities in children occur around and outside the bus. After children have exited the bus, they're either hit by a car or unfortunately hit by the bus itself.

Transport committee  That's correct. That's why there's been a lot of emphasis on putting in the stop arms and emphasizing legislation and penalties for drivers who go through the stop arm, because that's actually where most fatalities occur.

Transport committee  Again, it's a hard question to answer definitively. The numbers are actually, as I mentioned, quite low overall in terms of how many fatalities there are annually or over a number of years. There's no doubt that certain fatalities would likely have been prevented. They prevent

Transport committee  They do not. There's a formal position statement with respect to auto safety, but there has not been a formal position statement or outline on that. We haven't gotten there yet.

Transport committee  I think so. Can I get clarification? When you say “study”, are you specifically referring to seat belts on school buses, or are you referring to—

Transport committee  Yes. Again, I think the epidemiologic trend sort of supports that. The largest number of injuries occur around the bus and not in the bus, with respect to crashes. That's just due to the fact that most kids go to and from school, as I mentioned, at low speed on city streets, and

Transport committee  As a trauma physician, I always tell parents, families and residents I work with first of all that the best way to save someone is to prevent the crash from happening in the first place. When we're talking about these crashes—and I'll talk about what we can do to improve survivab

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  Obviously, the biggest mitigator is speed. I won't spend much more time than that in terms of if the thing that it collides with or the bus itself is speeding; that's going to make the injury less and less survivable. With each increase of 10 or 15 kilometres per hour of speed, y

Transport committee  I have to concede that that's sort of beyond my level of expertise. I will acknowledge that the first comment you made is spot-on. Belts will mitigate, but not eliminate, injuries. In fact, you see different injury patterns depending on the type of belt being worn. Certainly, as

Transport committee  Typically, our centre actually sees kids up to 16, but of course, you can have a 15-year-old who looks like they're 25, and you can have a 19-year-old who looks like they're 13. We actually typically go more on what their body habitus is like in terms of whether they have gone th

Transport committee  I think so. Again, that's probably more of an engineering or physics question. I can certainly tell you from experience that we absolutely see kids who are injured from hitting things within the bus. They're actually often not necessarily severe injuries, but lower-speed potent