Estimation of the real number of road casualties in Europe

Modeling road accident injury under-reporting in Europe

“…The characteristics of the studies, summarized in Table 1, varied as regards the sample size, the study area etc. ; however the results of each study provide a good indication of the magnitude of road accident underreporting in the examined area [5].…”

“…These coefficients were developed within the framework of the SafetyNet research project [5]. The basic approach adopted for the development of the coefficients is based on a linkage of road accident and medical databases, in order to identify an appropriate common European injury classification standard and identify the extent of under-reporting in national databases.…”

“…Each study was carried out following a common framework of linking the road accident database (maintained usually by the police) to a medical database (from hospitals), to identify all common records and to copy details from the medical record of each linked casualty to the corresponding record in the police database. The combined police and medical data set of each study was used to produce a distinct threedimensional matrix of predefined common format for casualty counts, based on the severity of their injuries [6]. The characteristics of the studies, summarized in Table 1, varied as regards the sample size, the study area etc.…”

“…Moreover, a number of extra injuries, not recorded by Hospitals, were found in the Police files. For details on the matching and classification of injury records, the reader is referred to Broughton et al [6] It is noted that external cause codes were used for identifying hospital-treated injury cases resulting from motor vehicle crashes on public roads, namely the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9 for Spain and the Netherlands and ICD-10 for the other countries), from which the Abbreviated Injury Scale of each casualty can be calculated.…”

“…road user type, injury severity) through log-rate models developed for this purpose. The level of road accident injury underreporting was quantified by means of appropriate underreporting coefficients for each European country/region, reflecting the rate of the estimated actual number of road accident casualties to the number of casualties recorded by the Police [5]. Eight studies were carried out on that purpose, using a specially developed uniform methodology, based on linking and matching Police and Hospital non fatal injury records.…”