More than 40,000 people die each year in motor vehicle crashes in the United States, and many more are seriously injured. Reducing this toll is a major goal of governments at all levels. Since the 1960s, the number of fatalities per mile driven has fallen by 75 percent owing to a combination of public and private actions to improve driver performance, motor vehicles, the highway environment, and postcrash emergency response and medical care. As a result, thousands of deaths and millions of injuries have been prevented. Nevertheless, the consequences of motor vehicle crashes continue to be a major public health problem and the leading cause of death among children and young adults. Continued growth in motor vehicle travel means that larger and larger improvements in crash rates are needed to produce any reduction in the total number of people killed and injured in crashes each year. Yet improvements in crash rates in the United States have been lagging behind those of many other developed countries.

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 667: Model Curriculum for Highway Safety Core Competencies presents course materials, including the instructor's guide and student workbook, for a fundamental highway safety training course. The course is designed to address the core competencies highway safety practitioners should have or acquire. An accompanying CD-ROM includes a brochure and short Microsoft PowerPoint presentation for marketing the training course. The CD-ROM is also available for download from TRB's website as an ISO image.

This digest summarizes the results of a study conducted by Paul Jovanis and Frank Gross, Pennsylvania State University.

Fixing the carnage on our roadways requires a change in mindset and a dramatic transformation of transportation. This goes for traffic engineers in particular because they are still the ones in charge of our streets. In Killed by a Traffic Engineer, civil engineering professor Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought. While traffic engineers are not trying to cause deliberate harm to anyone, he explains, they are guilty of creating a transportation system whose designs remain largely based on plausible, but unproven, conjecture. Killed by a Traffic Engineer is ultimately hopeful about what is possible once we shift our thinking and demand streets engineered for the safety of people, both outside and inside of cars. It will make you look at your city and streets--and traffic engineers--in a new light and inspire you to take action.

The Institute of Medicine study Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001) recommended that an interdisciplinary summit be held to further reform of health professions education in order to enhance quality and patient safety. Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality is the follow up to that summit, held in June 2002, where 150 participants across disciplines and occupations developed ideas about how to integrate a core set of competencies into health professions education. These core competencies include patient-centered care, interdisciplinary teams, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, and informatics. This book recommends a mix of approaches to health education improvement, including those related to oversight processes, the training environment, research, public reporting, and leadership. Educators, administrators, and health professionals can use this book to help achieve an approach to education that better prepares clinicians to meet both the needs of patients and the requirements of a changing health care system.