Police Road Research Articles

Data for the Study of Road Crashes in Australia

The purpose of this study was to document the variety and relative usefulness of road crash databases in Australia. Although analysis of some of these databases has been published in a variety of Australian and overseas publications, and the existence of these databases is known generally within the road crash research community in Australia, such a comparison has not been previously documented in this way. In Australia, the number and characteristics of road crashes have been or are being recorded in primary or secondary source databases. This paper examines only primary source databases, some of which are specifically constructed from road crash information. For example, Main Roads, Transport Traffic and/or Police authorities in each state and territory maintain databases of reported (to the Police) road crashes. These databases are used to identify blackspots in the road environment, and assess both crash incidence and causation over time. Other primary source databases pertain to data collections made for other purposes. For example, state and territory health authorities collect in-patient, including injured road users, data for public and private hospitals. Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments of metropolitan public hospitals collect, out-patient data. Motor vehicle insurance companies collect data on motor vehicle damage claims. A discussion of the usefulness of these primary source databases in both aggregate road crash costings and cost-benefit analyses of road crash prevention and injury reduction programmes in Australia reveals some important shortcomings and recommendations for improvements. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E202275.

Under representation of morbidity from paediatric bicycle accidents by official statistics—a need for data collection in the accident and emergency department

Objectives—To determine the accuracy of currently available data on bicycle related injuries in children. Setting—A paediatric accident and emergency (A&E) department which annually treats approximately 30 000 new patients under...

Police Education in Road Traffic Law: Saxony, Germany

In the future, road traffic police will need competent leaders, who will require accurate knowledge of road traffic law and its practical application at local level. For this reason, the police in the German state of Saxony decided to create a separate field of 'road traffic science' in the education of police inspectors specialising in road traffic law. This article describes the Advanced College of Police in Saxony and its Department of Road Traffic Sciences. The College was founded on 1 October 1994, and has its own professors, lecturers and highly educated police officers. 60% of its students are police officers, with several years of professional experience, from operational division and detective branches, and the other 40% are students with university entrance qualifications. So far, the two groups of students seem to have integrated with each other and learned from each other well. The School has a Department of Road Traffic Sciences, because of rising problems in managing traffic. The subjects covered by the Department include traffic law, supervision of traffic, road safety, the handling of road accidents, and traffic flow. The three-year course in the Department has 24 months of theoretical education, together with four three-month practice periods in service authorities.

The feasibility of linking hospital and police road crash casualty records without names

Government and other agencies routinely collect complementary information on road crash casualties and there may be opportunities to widen the scope of data available for research and policy evaluation if mechanisms can be established to combine these data sources. Where unit record data are available, direct links within and between individual records can often be achieved using record linkage techniques. Without the benefit of unique identifiers, sufficient other identifying information such as the full name, date of birth and sex of the casualty, their role in the crash and the date of the crash are required to enable correct links between individual records to be made. However, all these data items may not be available and it is therefore important to investigate the effect this may have on the quality and quantity of links between records. The research reported here used the hospital admission and police records from the Western Australian Road Injury Database, which had previously been linked using all the identifying characteristics mentioned above, special purpose software and comprehensive manual checking. This set of linked records were considered to be a “gold standard” which could be used to measure the quantity and quality of links produced using fewer identifying characteristics. Results from this process showed that about 90% of the original links could be identified when a phonetic code of the family name of the casualty was used with age, sex, road user type and crash date. However, only about 50% of the original links were found if linking was performed without using names or phonetic name codes.

A comparison of hospital and police road injury data

In order to gather as much information as possible on road crashes and outcomes, routinely collected police reports of traffic accidents and hospital discharge files were individually matched or “linked” using a computerised iterative procedure on name-identified data from both sources. The two groups of linked and unlinked hospital records were compared. Within the linked dataset, a comparison of like variables was made and showed good agreement between the two sources on accident type and road user type. However, police-reported levels of injury severity were shown to be less reliable. In addition, the proportion of hospital inpatient records that linked to a police record was found to be influenced by several factors. The overall linkage rate from hospital to police was 64% but varied from 29% for motorcyclists in single-vehicle accidents to 79% for motor vehicle drivers. The linkage rate increased with increasing levels of injury severity and was substantially lower for casualties of certain ethnic groups. It was deduced that for most instances where a hospital record did not link to a police record, the crash had not been reported. These findings confirm that there was considerable underreporting of hospitalised road casualties to the police and that the extent of underreporting was greater for those less severely injured.

Road Check Police Road Block

Road Check Police Road Block

Using accident injury data to assess the impact of community first aid training

In a U.K. First Aid Community Training Project from a twon with a population of around 19,000 over 1200 people took a 4-h emergency first aid course. Independent evidence for the effects of the training was obtained from hospital casualty registers and from police road traffic accident data. The data indicated that the first aid training significantly reduced the accident injury rate in the community. Age, sex and accident location effects are discussed with reference to the disaggregated empirical data. It is argued that there are substantial indirect effects from the training, particularly the influence of first aid-trained adults upon children, as well as direct effects upon trained individuals shown by earlier studies.

Police recording of road accident in-patients: Investigation into the completeness, representativity and reliability of police records of hospitalized traffic victims

Many road safety research projects make use of the official police road accident data. Their use is often restricted to the data of fatal accidents and fatalities because it is the only complete registration, and the extent of underreporting of injury accidents is unknown. The need to extend the use of data beyond fatalities is great for two reasons: (1) in a small country like the Netherlands the absolute numbers (less than 2000 fatalities per annum in recent years) are often too small for detailed analyses. (2) Fatal accidents are not typical road accidents but an extreme type. Data on surviving in-patients however, is not so extreme and there are more than 20,000 per annum. The incomplete police data on road accident in-patients was compared with the hospital discharge data to establish how representative it was. Hospital data was collected through the Medical Record Foundation, a national institution, which registers approx. 95% of all road accident in-patients. During the years 1977–1979 it was found that the extent of underreporting was constant and for the year 1979 the police data had a coverage of 83% of all road accident in-patients. According to the results of an Eckart-Young analysis, the general structures of the police and hospital data were similar but there were differences. The underreporting of users of motorized vehicles in the age group 15–34 yr was significantly smaller than for others; and of cyclists and pedestrians, particularly in the age group 0–14 yr, significantly greater. The police data is therefore reliable for time series and for period studies of most mode of transport/age group combinations.