About the Study
Social Science & Medicine published the study online on March 8, 2026. It was co-authored by Nora Groce, Memory Chatukuta, Daniel Mont, Mónica Pinilla-Roncancio, Jill Hanass-Hancock, Deepika Sandhya Raja, and Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo.
Road crashes kill more people than almost any other cause worldwide, but the disability that follows for millions of survivors barely registers in either field. New disability research on road traffic accidents, co-authored by Daniel Mont of the Center for Inclusive Policy (CIP), argues that crashes deserve far more attention as a cause of disability than they currently get.
The Scale of the Problem
The World Health Organization estimates 1.19 million road traffic deaths in 2021, making crashes the 8th leading cause of death globally and the leading killer of children and young adults. Beyond the fatalities, an additional 50 million people are seriously injured every year. More than half of all deaths occur among people aged 18 to 34, and the burden falls disproportionately on low- and middle-income countries.
A Cause of Disability Hiding in Plain Sight
Deaths from road crashes get counted. Disability resulting from them, far less so. The researchers argue that road traffic accidents are a leading, though rarely acknowledged, cause of disability worldwide. Once someone leaves medical or rehabilitative care after a crash, the road safety community tends to lose track of them entirely, and disability researchers rarely think to look for them in the first place.
Why Two Fields That Should Talk Don't
Road Traffic Safety and disability research operate as separate worlds, with separate data systems, separate funding streams, and separate policy conversations. That separation isn’t a minor inefficiency: it means nobody is systematically tracking how many people acquire disabilities through road crashes, what support they receive afterward, or whether existing services actually reach them.
What Did the Research Find?
A Scoping Review
The authors reviewed existing literature across both fields to map what is, and isn’t, currently known about the connection between road traffic accidents and disability.
Expert Interviews
They also interviewed practitioners and researchers from both the Road Traffic Safety and disability fields, surfacing conceptual gaps that a literature review alone wouldn’t catch, particularly around how people who acquire disabilities in crashes are identified, followed over time, and connected to services.
What Needs to Change?
The paper’s central call is for “joined-up thinking”: bringing road safety and disability data systems into the same conversation, so that survivors aren’t lost in the space between two fields that each assume someone else is tracking them. Without that, a major global health concern keeps being treated as two separate, smaller ones.
