Extend EU-compatibility of non-fatal accidents

A method has been developed to enable inclusion of non-fatal accident in EU accident comparisons. This method consists of comparing:

• those road accident victims who have been recorded in the national accident database, with
• those who have been recorded in medical records maintained by hospitals.

Based on such a comparison, for each country, the actual number of non-fatal casualties can be estimated from the registered number. Comparison with hospital data is a vital step since hospital data provide a more overview of all traffic injured than the national accident databases and, moreover, also provide a more detailed view of the types of injuries. The comparison is done in three research steps:

• Linking road accident and medical databases, to investigate the level of under-reporting and, equally importantly, to copy details from the medical record of each linked casualty to the corresponding record in the accident database.
• Determining whether the distributions of linked casualties from the national studies are similar in terms of medical variables such as seriousness of injury and length of hospital stay.
• Defining a new injury classification based on the most appropriate medical variable(s) and calculating national coefficients to estimate ‘true’ casualty totals from the numbers recorded in CARE database.