Under-reporting of Road Casualties: Phase 1

There is some concern that the trends in the serious road traffic injuries as recorded in STATS19 may not be an altogether accurate reflection of the true situation.

Indeed, there is general recognition and acceptance that the STATS19 record is an underestimation of the actual number of road traffic accident casualties. This has been acknowledged for some time and studies have been undertaken which provide estimates of this shortfall.

But the issue is how constant over time are the levels of under-recording, misclassification and under-reporting, especially of serious accidents, to the police. And, if they are not constant, by how much have they changed, so that the implications can be assessed to inform road safety policy and practice to the end of this target period.

The aim of this study is to assess the level of under-reporting and misclassification of road traffic casualties, and, in particular, to find out whether there have been any changes in reporting and/or recording practices over the period 1996–2004.

The objectives are:

• to provide a comprehensive review of previous studies of under-reporting;

• to find out what additional sources of health data are available both across Great Britain as a whole (taking account of differences between the data collection systems of, say, England and Scotland) and locally that can be used to investigate the extent of under-reporting of road casualties;

• to see how the available data could be used for the purpose of this study;

• to carry out analysis of the available data to inform our knowledge and understanding of the extent of under-reporting;

• to compare current information with the results of other studies of underreporting; and

• to make recommendations for further data collection, to be undertaken in Phase 2, in order to address the questions that cannot be answered with the available data.

Previous studies were reviewed as part of this study. They all agree that there is some degree of under-reporting of casualties to the police and some are able to estimate levels of under-recording and misclassification.

However, most studies do not describe their methods in sufficient detail for comparisons to be made. Most, it seems, look at the number of casualties in the police record that can also be found in the records of the accident and emergency (A&E) department of the relevant local hospital.

In general, these studies do not take into account the casualties the police know about but the hospital do not.