“I'd love to bring the kids who pack race in here to show them what we have to deal with,” said nurse Debbie Hume, one of the dedicated staff of 22 at the King Edward VII Hospital Intensive Care Unit.

Having had 29 road accident victims through their doors so far this year, the staff here are only too aware of the dangers on the Island's thoroughfares.

To get through the doors of this unit, temporarily rehoused on the hospital's groundfloor, you have to be in a pretty bad way with serious head injuries accounting for well over half the admissions.

“Patients come straight from emergency and are normally in a pretty horrendous situation,” said the department's clinical co-ordinator Glenda Daniels, herself the victim of two broken arms in scooter crashes during her first year on the Island.

“When we get them here they are normally in pieces and we have to give them one-to-one care. When they first arrive the situation is very dynamic with the different physicians surrounding the patient as we look to stabilise them.

“We normally have to drill a bolt into their heads to monitor the pressure in their brain.”

As well as the accident victims themselves, there are also the friends and families to deal with.

Staff endeavour to allow close relatives to get a look at the patient as early as possible after their admittance - even just seeing the person, however many machines they are hooked up to, can help.

When a youngster is involved, as an alarming number seem to be, the corridors of the hospital can be filled with as many as 50 or 60 friends, sometimes whole school classes, as news of the accident spreads.

And on an Island of this size, staff have the horrible situation of dealing with people they know, and sometimes know well, on an all too regular basis. Mrs. Daniels lost a close family friend in a bike accident while one young victim on the road was the child of a fellow hospital employee.

Nurses have access to counselling services, something that is often needed in such a high pressure environment.

“Having to deal with major traumas on such a regular basis will have an impact,” continued Mrs. Daniels.

“The nurses are debriefed regularly which you would expect when they are working under a lot of high stress.

“The hardest situation is when a young person dies. It is devastating to lose a child in here.”

Fortunately of the 29 admissions this year, only two have died and the department is highly regarded for its level of one-to-one care.

But it is a busy place to be, something the staff here don't think will change.

“ We need a monster road safety campaign,” said Ms Hume, who also has been knocked off her bike here.

“We need to involve schools, the Police, Government, everyone.

“It is just a matter of trying to change attitudes. We see a lot of people with high impact injuries that is the result of speeding.

“The roads are not a safe place, the kids think they are indestructible.

“You'd think that their friends coming in to see them here, hooked up to a ventilator, would then think about the way they ride.

“But you could be out on the roads the next week and see them riding with helmets skew-whiff, dragging their feet on the ground doing all the things they were doing anyway. Nothing seems to change their perception.”

One clear example that the victims of road accidents are not always helping themselves is the different sort of injuries that tourists pick up.

Many of the short-term visitors to the Island who wind up in ICU have rib and abdominal injuries which although painful, are nowhere near as life-threatening as head injuries.

And these sort of injuries are associated with low speed collisions.

“They get these falling off their bikes on to kerbs and walls,” continued Ms Hume.

“They are going slower so this is all they have to suffer. It is the people who go fast who get the serious injuries.”

As well as having to deal with the physical and mental fall-out from victims of crashes on the road, the staff of the ICU also have something else in common they are all better drivers for their experiences at work.

Mrs. Daniels will not ride a bike any more while nurse Vickie Smith will only use taxis in the evening.

They have taken these decisions because they can see what the roads can to do a person, and a person's family, and they don't want to end up like their patients on ventilators with bolts in their heads.