Initiative details
Although a road collision is over in seconds, its consequences can last for years. In 2025 Czech police investigated 85,518 road crashes, in which 421 people died, 1,647 were seriously injured and 25,013 sustained minor injuries. The official injury count captures only part of the harm. Research indicates that around one in three people seriously affected by a crash develops lasting psychological harm, while only about six per cent seek professional help. Victims, witnesses, bereaved families and drivers responsible for crashes often describe a second injury: impersonal contact with police, insurers, courts and hospitals at the moment they are least able to absorb more stress — an experience they carry for years. Our goal is therefore not only to ease this harm but, above all, to prevent it. This is the prevention that road safety tends to forget: while most measures reduce the number of crashes and physical injuries, we reduce and prevent psychological ones. The Dialogue workshops, the community of affected people and our public counselling all work as prevention, stopping an initial shock from developing into lasting trauma. The Safe System approach behind EU road-safety policy includes this post-crash stage, yet in practice it is the part most often left aside. Our initiative addresses exactly this.
Initiative date
to
Who was/is your target audience?
Policy makers
Public authorities
Adults
Car drivers
Emergency services
Others
Topic
Create awareness
Knowledge building and sharing
Provide alternative solutions
Training
Organisation details
Centrum dopravního výzkumu, v. v. i.
School / Research centre
Czech Republic
Brno
Contact name
David Červinka
Telephone number
+420774 966 908
david.cervinka@cdv.gov.cz
Website link
Project activities
If you work together with external partners, list the most important partners and briefly describe their role.
We began by trying to understand how other countries care for people after crashes and what could be transferred to Czechia. We interviewed representatives of support systems in Spain, Slovenia, Poland, Luxembourg and Germany, and gathered written input from Greece. The ambassador model came from this exchange: in Slovenia it is used mainly in schools and public awareness, while we applied the principle of ambassadors with lived experience to the training of professionals.
Please describe the project activities you carried/are carrying out and the time period over which these were implemented.
We did not design the initiative from a desk. Using a human-centred design approach, we developed it together with people affected by crashes and with frontline professionals. It rests on three connected elements. Dialogue is a facilitated full-day workshop in which professionals — police officers, paramedics, judges, probation officers, insurers and social workers — meet people who have lived through a crash. There is no lecture: working from real testimony, professionals examine their own routines, language and ingrained assumptions and look for where they could act more sensitively. Community is a self-governed group of affected people that, unusually, includes drivers responsible for crashes. It gives members relational support and grows ambassadors who join the Dialogue workshops and become the voice of affected people within the system; today it has around twenty active members. The third element reaches the public: the project website www.ponehodovapece.cz, integrated into the Záchranka emergency app, offers free counselling, guidance by role (injured party, responsible driver, bereaved, witness), a map of help, a phone line and peer support from ambassadors — early help that can prevent trauma from taking hold. In the pilot we ran five full-day Dialogue workshops with 55 frontline professionals.
In terms of implementation, what worked well and what challenges did you need to overcome?
What worked best was the format itself. When professionals and affected people sit together around real testimony rather than slides, something shifts that conventional training rarely achieves; participants repeatedly called it one of the most meaningful professional events they had attended. Co-designing the content with affected people kept it honest. The most powerful moment was the inclusion of drivers responsible for crashes. Drawing on restorative-justice principles, they sat in the same room as victims and bereaved families, and for several affected people this meant the chance to forgive, and for those responsible the chance to be forgiven. That is an experience almost impossible to have anywhere else, and it helped participants integrate what they had been through. The biggest obstacle, though, was not outside but within us: we had to convince ourselves that a single, well-facilitated meeting could carry such force. The second challenge was sensitivity and trust — working with traumatised people demands careful facilitation and clear boundaries — together with the patience needed to find affected people willing to speak publicly. Once those conditions are met, a single day is enough to leave a lasting mark on a professional.
Evaluation
Please summarise how you have evaluated the initiative’s impact (e.g. social media reach, survey, feedback forms, statistics).
Evaluation combined qualitative and quantitative methods. Its foundation was a qualitative study of the Czech post-accident care system: 41 semi-structured interviews with 39 experts and three focus groups with 18 experts, transcribed and analysed thematically. An empathic-design phase added 13 in-depth interviews with affected people — victims, bereaved relatives, witnesses and drivers responsible for crashes — and six interviews with foreign support systems. Dialogue itself was assessed through structured feedback from participants after each workshop. We did not look for grand, one-off statements but for small, concrete shifts in professional practice — micro-changes in how a professional speaks and what they do differently at the next contact with an affected person — because these are what gradually add up to a change of culture. Alongside the workshops, we tracked the reach of the public-facing work — visits to the project website, social-media following, and coverage in the media, on television and in podcasts — to gauge how far the message travels. Throughout, affected people evaluated each iteration of the design, so it was corrected against real experience rather than assumptions. The findings were written up in expert publications and a transferable methodology manual, so that evaluation feeds directly into replication elsewhere.
What has been the effect of the activities?
The clearest effects are on professional practice. In structured post-workshop evaluation, 77% of participating professionals reported that they had reflected on how they themselves communicate with affected people, and 62% said this format should become a regular part of professional training in their field. Some described concrete changes in how they act on duty. These small shifts are exactly the prevention we seek: every more sensitive word from a professional lowers the risk that a second injury is added to the first. For affected people, the Community created the first setting where their experience is treated as expertise rather than a case file; members report less isolation and post-traumatic growth, and return as ambassadors. The reach extends far beyond the workshops. Post-accident guidance is now built into the Záchranka app, which has over 3.4 million users in Czechia — roughly one in three inhabitants. The project's own website, live since 2025, has already drawn around 1,500 visitors in its first nine months and is steadily growing, and its social channels reach a widening public (more than 540 followers on Facebook across 66 posts, and around 200 on Instagram). At system level the initiative produced a transferable methodology and a standing community of affected people the system can turn to. The effect is best understood as preventing secondary harm.
Please briefly explain why your initiative is a good example of improving road safety.
Beyond the Crash is a strong example because it addresses a real but neglected dimension of road safety — preventing and easing psychological trauma after a crash — with a method that is evidence-based, low-cost and genuinely transferable. It needs no new institutions, legislation or infrastructure, only existing professional-training time and a network of affected people willing to take part. We tested the same format in three structurally different regions (industrial, rural, urban) and obtained consistent results, so the method does not depend on metropolitan resources or a particular institutional culture. The underlying problem — a depersonalised post-accident pathway and the risk that an initial shock develops into lasting psychological trauma — is shared across Europe; six interviews with peer initiatives in Spain, Slovenia, Poland, Luxembourg, Germany and Greece confirmed that no comparable participatory format yet exists. The Dialogue and Community methodology is written up as a manual, so any region or organisation can adopt it, together with the principle that preventing the onset of psychological trauma after a crash is itself a measurable road-safety intervention.
How have you shared information about your project and its results?
The initiative has a strong public identity with nationwide reach. Its guidance reaches people across the country through the website www.ponehodovapece.cz and, above all, through integration into the Záchranka app, one of the most widely used emergency apps in Czechia. The topic is carried further by ambassadors speaking from their own lived experience, and through professional conferences, podcasts and the media — from memorial events on the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims to the podcast "Even the person responsible is human". Together these channels give the project credibility and visibility well beyond the professionals directly involved.
Supporting materials
