Witnessing a road accident

Being a witness to a road accident can be a very traumatic experience, but always try to remain calm. Even if you have no first aid training there are still many things you can do to help with the situation.

What to do first

The first thing you should do is to park your car somewhere safely off the road if possible and turn on your hazard lights. Someone then needs to call the emergency services and give them an accurate description of the location, the number of vehicles involved and an idea of how many people may be injured.

Speak to the other witnesses at the scene first and try to ensure one of the calmer individuals makes the call, this is to avoid several different callers possibly giving conflicting information.

What else you can do to help

If the accident is on a minor road or round a sharp bend, it will be helpful to get someone to walk along the edge of the road to a point where they can safely warn approaching traffic of the hazard.

Make sure you and anyone else helping at the scene does not smoke, there may be spilt fuel at the scene and this could easily be ignited. Try to organise any other witnesses to perform various tasks and find out if anyone has any first aid experience.

Basic First Aid

If you are not confident with administering first aid it is probably best if you just try to comfort any injured individuals as best you can until the emergency services arrive.

If you feel able, there are a few key issues that need to be dealt with any injury.

Firstly do not move the injured person because they may have sustained a neck or spinal injury and moving them could make things much worse

Check that the individuals airway is clear and unobstructed, so they can breathe easily

If they are bleeding, pressing on or 'compressing' the wound will help restrict the blood flow. This should be done wearing gloves to avoid coming into contact with the person’s blood

Try to keep the person warm with jackets or blankets, this will help with their circulation

Stay with the injured person and talk to them, don't let them move about and reassure them that help is on the way

Information you can gather to help someone with a claim

To help the victim of the accident you should make a note of all the registration numbers of the vehicles involved, contact details of other witnesses, make a note of the circumstances of the incident and take photographs of the scene. If the Police ask you what happened, try to recall as much detail as you can.

If you have been involved in a car accident that was not your fault we can arrange for your car to be repaired at one of our approved repair centres, and provide you with a quality comparable replacement hire car all at the expense of the person at-faults insurer.

Please give us a call us on 0845 6768898 or start your claim enquiry using our online claim form.