Someone is always responsible when a person is injured or dies on a
farm.
It is a harsh but necessary message, says Jim Dosman, director of the
Centre for Agricultural Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.
Unless people are educated to the fact that all accidents are
preventable events, they won’t change. That is what the media should be
relaying, said Dosman and Julie Bidwell of the centre’s Institute of
Agricultural Rural and Environmental Health.
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They want newspaper, radio and television stories about farm deaths and
injuries to report them as incidents or events rather than accidents.
“Language does convey the attitude,” said Dosman.
And the mistaken attitude with the word accident is that it is an act
of fate, not a controllable situation.
To reinforce this, the institute is offering a media excellence award
for farm injury reporting. The $1,500 award will be given Dec. 4, 2002,
from nominated stories by Saskatchewan media.
Dosman equated the request to a similar change in gender sensitivity
that led the media to include “he and she” in stories and not just the
male reference alone.
On average in Saskatchewan, 21 people die and more than 300 are
hospitalized each year as a result of farm incidents.
Injuries place third behind cardiovascular disease and cancer as the
leading causes of premature death.
