Motor vehicle crashes, they're almost always a reflection of driver error.

Sometimes it's a defect in the vehicle or the roadway.

The sources of driver error though are so delicate to on earth.

Donald Redmer is a doctor and researcher at the University of Toronto in Canada.

I work at Canada's largest trauma center.

Look after many patients in the aftermath of truly serious motor vehicle crashes.

Car crashes are a problem there.

In 2019, five out of every 100,000 people died in a motor vehicle collision in Canada.

But there are a bigger problem in the US, where that same year, 13 out of every 100,000 people died in crashes.

I usually don't ask them what happened at the crash because they just don't know.

A crash happened so quickly and often there's some surrounding amnesia.

It's very, very difficult to actually recall the circumstances of the crash.

Instead, I like to ask patients, was it a normal day when you started off?

And it's surprising how often they say no, Dr. Redmer.

It was a stressful day beginning in the morning.

They were deadlines and all of a sudden my bad day got worse.

So, were you described as a broad or narrative, which is let's just step back and ask what happens to someone who gets in an accident?

I think we often think of it as exogenous.

There were weather factors or maybe at that moment, they were distracted by something, you know, a phone call or the other driver was distracted by something.

But what you're suggesting is that, no, something preceded that.

There was some underlying level of stress that may have started at the very beginning of the day that has this sort of ripple effect.

Yeah, that's a part of it, although in general it's just so hard to study stress because people define it quite differently and there's always the fallibility of self-report.

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