Injury Statistics

Collection of injury statistics on road crashes

ACRS Policy Position

States and Territories should direct resources into collecting and compiling high quality data on road crashes causing injury.

Objective

To better understand the causes and contributing factors to road crashes, and to direct resources where needed to reduce road trauma

Discussion

Australia has a generally good database on road crashes involving fatalities, and the resulting road trauma.   This is because resources were directed to collecting and collating that data, developing a common definition of a road death, and related matters.   Also, accounting for death is rigorous and the coroner's inquiries that follow road a road crash death mean that there is the basis for a comprehensive database on all aspects of the event:   vehicle or vehicles, road and road environment, and persons involved.

However, the less severe the crash in terms of road trauma, the less reliable and complete is the data.   There are many reasons for this.   At the least severe end of the scale - crashes involving property damage only - this is because many crashes are not required to be reported (all jurisdictions have threshold reporting requirements which eliminate less severe collisions from consideration) and because for a variety of reasons many crashes that should be reported, are not.  

With respect to crashes resulting in injury, especially less severe injuries, there are inaccuracies and gaps because of incomplete data.   With respect to crashes resulting in serious injury, while there is possibly some non reporting, the reasons for the data not being complete are somewhat different.   Here the greater problem is the non-matching of police crash data and hospital treatment or admission data.   The reasons for this include:

·         No real knowledge by the police at the scene of a crash, of whether a person is admitted to hospital, or treated and allowed to go home

·         A person's status may change once they reach the hospital emergency department

·         A person may present to the hospital for treatment some time after the crash

·         Privacy considerations not permitting matching of police and hospital data, apart from the problems already mentioned.

There are other reasons, bearing particularly on crashes involving serious injury (eg, where a person is admitted to hospital).   The cost of serious injury crashes is estimated at $7.15 billion (see BTE Report 102, Road Crash Costs in Australia), almost half the currently estimated cost of road crashes at $14.998bn and more than three times the cost of fatal crashes ($2.92bn), but very little is known about serious injury crashes as such.   Further, there is no common definition across all Australian jurisdictions of a 'serious injury crash'.  

There has been some study of injury crashes (eg the study by Monash University Accident Research Centre on Passenger Cars and Occupant Injury, and succeeding studies covering side impact crashes, utilities and four wheel drive vehicles) but there is no comprehensive database like that for fatal crashes, and at present it would not be possible to construct such a database.

These problems become significant because they mask the true extent of road trauma.   The real extent of road crash injuries, and hence the cost to the community, may be greater than is believed.   This may be significant because it affects the estimation of the resources that should be applied to preventing road crashes, compared to other social needs.  

Further, it is assumed that the characteristics and contributing factors for all crashes are similar, and accordingly crash prevention strategies are applied to all crashes.   However, because so little is known about crashes involving serious injury, it may be that this assumption is unjustified and that prevention of crashes that result in serious injury demands strategies that are different from those being applied at present.  

ACRS believes that a similar level of effort to that which has been applied to developing a database of fatal crashes should be applied to serious injury crashes.   This will probably require a significant increase in resources, but given the presently estimated (and probably underestimated) cost of serious injury crashes, a significant increase in resources can be regarded as an investment.

References

Bureau of Transport Economics (2000), Road Crash Costs in Australia, Report 102, Canberra

Monash University Accident Research Centre, post-crash studies dealing with analysis of injury characteristics and outcomes of road crashes:   FORS Consultant Reports CR 95, 100, 134, 137, 150.