Road Safety
- Publication no: AP-R694-23
- ISBN: 978-1-922994-03-5
- Published: 7 September 2023
- PDF (free) Download
This report documents Stage 2 of an Austroads project to improve the measurement and reporting of serious injury crashes by matching crash and hospital data. Stage 1 provided proof of concept for a national approach to supply data on non-fatal hospitalised road injuries. The aim of Stage 2 was to extend the Stage 1 process to include more jurisdictions and include 10 years of data from 2008.
The National Road Safety Strategy includes a target of a 30% reduction of serious road injury (defined in the Strategy as non-fatal hospitalised cases). Neither crash nor hospital data alone provide an adequate national data source for reporting progress against the target. Record linkage of hospital and crash data can overcome some of the limitations of relying on either alone, and has been recognised by road safety agencies as integral to future reporting.
Key outcomes of Stage 2: crash data and hospital data were obtained from seven jurisdictions (all but Western Australia), linked, processed, and analysed. Estimates were provided for two sets of serious injury indicators equivalent to NRSS 2011-2020 fatality indicators, for six jurisdictions from 2008 and for seven jurisdictions from 2013. The overall annual number of serious road injury cases rose during the study period, as did rates based on population. Rates based on travel distance and number of registered vehicles did not rise. Trends vary by jurisdiction and indicator. The values are about 9% lower than estimates based solely on non-linked hospital data.
Summary and recommendation: It is feasible to register and analyse serious road injuries in Australia. Problems encountered in the Stage 2 project (notably non-provision of some requested data, slowness of access to data and time-consuming checking and preparation of 10 years of data) and the ways in which they have been tackled provides a basis for the development of a national register of serious road injuries.
Watch a webinar with Professor James Harrison and Associate Professor Angela Watson who explain the method used in Stage 2 of the project and provide a detailed overview of the project findings.
- Summary
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Project Method
- 2.1 Development and Organisation of the Stage 2 Project
- 2.2 Undertaking Stage 2
- 3. Seeking Approval to Use Data and Data Provision
- 3.1 Record Selection
- 3.1.1 Crash Data
- 3.1.2 Hospital Data
- 3.1.3 Death Data
- 3.2 Seeking Approval
- 3.2.1 Hospital Data
- 3.2.2 Crash Data
- 3.3 Approval Timetable
- 3.1 Record Selection
- 4. Case Estimation and Analysis
- 4.1 Preparation and Analysis of Linked Data
- 4.1.1 Data Preparation, Cleaning and Assembly of the Working File
- 4.1.2 Terms and Definitions
- 4.2 Case Estimation Process
- 4.2.1 Identify Crash and Hospital Records that are for the Same Person and Crash (CH Pairs)
- 4.2.2 Identify Hospital Records that Mark the First Episode of Care After a Road Crash
- 4.2.3 Primary Linkage
- 4.2.4 Checking and Correction of Record Grouping
- 4.1 Preparation and Analysis of Linked Data
- 5. Statistical Overview
- 5.1 Case Counts
- 5.2 Rates and Trends
- 5.3 Components of Counts: CH Pairs and H Only Cases
- 5.4 Cross-border Cases
- 6. Hospitalised Non-fatal Road Injury NRSS 2011-2020 Fatality Equivalent Indicators
- 6.1 Status (a): Indicators that can be Reported Using Hospital Data
- 6.2 Status (b): Indicators Based Only on Linked Hospital and Crash Data
- 7. Response to Objectives and Conclusions
- 7.1 Project Objectives
- 7.2 Supplementary Method to Find CH Pairs
- 7.3 Next Steps
- References
- Appendix A Data Sources
- Appendix B Ethical Approval
- Appendix C Data Item Lists for the Crash and Hospital Data
- Appendix D Terms and Definitions
- D.1 Relevant Terms in ICD-10
- D.2 Scope of Road and Synonymous Terms
- D.3 Geography and Time
- D.4 Road Deaths
- D.5 Cross-border Cases
- D.6 Road User Classification
- D.7 Change Over Time
- Appendix E Additional Statistical Results
- Appendix F NRSS 2011-2020 Fatality Equivalent Indicators Data Issues
- F.1 How the Status of NRSS 2011-2020 Fatality Equivalent Indicators was Decided
- F.2 NRSS Reporting Considerations