An investigation of policy makers’ priorities for data and tools and their availability. Deliverable 1.4 of the EC FP7 project DaCoTA

An investigation of policy makers’ priorities for data and tools and their availability. Deliverable 1.4 of the EC FP7 project DaCoT

Analysis of the stakeholder survey: perceived priority and availability of data and tools and relation to the stakeholders' characteristics. Deliverable 1.5 (Vol. 1) of the EC FP7 project DaCoTA

Analysis of the stakeholder survey: perceived priority and availability of data and tools and relation to the stakeholders' characteristics. Deliverable 1.5 (Vol. 1) of the EC FP7 project DaCoT

Burden of injury of serious road injuries in six EU countries

BACKGROUND: Information about the burden of (non-fatal) road traffic injury is very useful to further improve road safety policy. Previous studies calculated the burden of injury in individual countries. This paper estimates and compares the burden of non-fatal serious road traffic injuries in six EU countries/regions: Austria, Belgium, England, The Netherlands, the Rhône region in France and Spain. METHODS: It is a cross-sectional study based on hospital discharge databases. POPULATION: of study are patients hospitalized with MAIS3+ due to road traffic injuries. The burden of injury (expressed in years lived with disability (YLD)) is calculated applying a method that is developed within the INTEGRIS study. The method assigns estimated disability information to the casualties using the EUROCOST injury classification. RESULTS: The average burden per MAIS3+ casualty varies between 2.4 YLD and 3.2 YLD per casualty. About 90% of the total burden of injury of MAIS3+ casualties is due to lifelong consequences that are experienced by 19% to 33% of the MAIS3+ casualties. Head injuries, spinal cord injuries and injuries to the lower extremities are responsible for more than 90% of the total burden of MAIS3+ road traffic injuries. Results per transport mode differ between the countries. Differences between countries are mainly due to differences in age distribution and in the distribution over EUROCOST injury groups of the casualties. CONCLUSION: The analyses presented in this paper can support further improvement of road safety policy. Countermeasures could for example be focused at reducing skull and brain injuries, spinal cord injuries and injuries to the lower extremities, as these injuries are responsible for more than 90% of the total burden of injury of MAIS3+ casualties

The New European Road Safety Observatory – SafetyNet

In 2004 there were over 43,000 people who were killed on the roads of the 25 member states of the European Union (EU), additionally around 3.3 million people were injured1. The costs to society exceeded €180 billion which is around twice the annual budget of the European Commission and 2% of EU GDP. In 2001 the European Commission adopted a target of reducing fatalities by 50% within a decade and identified several areas where it could make a direct contribution within the constraints of subsidiarity. The target was reaffirmed in 2003 in the Road Safety Action Programme that provided further detail about actions it planned to introduce. A key element in the Programme concerned the development of a new European Road Safety Observatory to gather data and knowledge to inform future safety policies. The development of the Observatory was to be undertaken by the Sixth Framework funded project “SafetyNet”. This paper describes the structure of the Observatory and the progress in developing new EU-wide accident data information within SafetyNet

Analysis of road safety management in the European countries. Deliverable 1.5 Vol.II of the EC FP7 project DaCoTA

Analysis of road safety management in the European countries. Deliverable 1.5 Vol.II of the EC FP7 project DaCoT

Practical guidelines for the registration and monitoring of serious traffic injuries, D7.1 of the H2020 project SafetyCube

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Crashes also cause numerous serious traffic injuries, resulting in considerable economic and human costs. Given the burden of injury produced by traffic, using only fatalities as an indicator to monitor road safety gives a very small picture of the health impact of traffic crashes, just the tip of the iceberg. Moreover, in several countries during the last years the number of serious traffic injuries has not been decreasing as fast as the number of fatalities. In other countries the number of serious traffic injuries has even been increasing (Berecki-Gisolf et al., 2013; IRTAD Working Group on Serious Road Traffic Casualties, 2010; Weijermars et al., 2015).Therefore, serious traffic injuries are more commonly being adopted by policy makers as an additional indicator of road safety. Reducing the number of serious traffic injuries is one of the key priorities in the road safety programme 2011-2020 of the European Commission (EC, 2010). To be able to compare performance and monitor developments in serious traffic injuries across Europe, a common definition of a serious road injury was necessary. In January 2013, the High Level Group on Road Safety, representing all EU Member States, established the definition of serious traffic injuries as road casualties with an injury level of MAIS ≥ 3. The Maximum AIS represents the most severe injury obtained by a casualty according to the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS). Traditionally the main source of information on traffic accidents and injuries has been the police registration. This provides the official data for statistics at national and European level (CARE Database). Data reported by police usually is very detailed about the circumstances of the crash particularly if there are people injured or killed. But on the other hand police cannot assess the severity of injuries in a reliable way, due, obviously to their training. Therefore, police based data use to classify people involved in a crash as fatality, severe injured if hospitalised more than 24 hours and slight injured if not hospitalised. Moreover, it is known that even a so clear definition as a fatality is not always well reported and produces underreporting. This is due to several factors such as lack of coverage of police at the scene or people dying at hospital not followed by police (Amoros et al., 2006; Broughton et al., 2007; Pérez et al., 2006). Hospital records of patients with road traffic injuries usually include very little information on circumstances of the crash but it does contain data about the person, the hospitalisation (date of hospitalisation and discharge, medical diagnosis, mechanism or external cause of injury, and interventions). Hospital inpatient Discharge Register (HDR) offers an opportunity to complement police data on road traffic injuries. Medical diagnoses can be used to derive information about severity of injuries. Among others, one of the possible scales to measure injury severity is the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS). The High Level group identified three main ways Member States can collect data on serious traffic injuries (MAIS ≥ 3): 1) by applying a correction on police data, 2) by using hospital data and 3) by using linked police and hospital data. Once one of these three ways is selected, several additional choices need to be made. In order to be able to compare injury data across different countries, it is important to understand the effects of methodological choices on the estimated numbers of serious traffic injuries. A number of questions arise: How to determine the correction factors that are to be applied to police data? How to select road traffic casualties in the hospital data and how to derive MAIS ≥ 3 casualties? How should police and hospital data be linked and how can the number of MAIS ≥ 3 casualties be determined on the basis of the linked data sources? Currently, EU member states use different procedures to determine the number of MAIS ≥ 3 traffic injuries, dependent on the available data. Given the major differences in the procedures being applied, the quality of the data differs considerably and the numbers are not yet fully comparable between countries. In order to be able to compare injury data across different countries, it is important to understand the effects of methodological choices on the estimated numbers of serious traffic injuries. Work Package 7 of SafetyCube project is dedicated to serious traffic injuries, their health impacts and their costs. One of the aims of work package 7 is to assess and improve the estimation of the number of serious traffic injuries. The aim of this deliverable (D7.1) is to report practices in Europe concerning the reporting of serious traffic injuries and to provide guidelines and recommendations applied to each of the three main ways to estimate the number of road traffic serious injuries. Specific objectives for this deliverable are to: Describe the current state of collection of data on serious traffic injuries across Europe Provide practical guidelines for the estimation of the number of serious traffic injuries for each of the three ways identified by the High Level Group Examine how the estimated number of serious traffic injuries is affected by differences in methodology

Physical and psychological consequences of serious road traffic injuries, deliverable 7.2 of the H2020 project SafetyCube

SafetyCube aims to develop an innovative road safety Decision Support System (DSS) that will enable policy-makers and stakeholders to select the most appropriate strategies, measures and cost-effective approaches to reduce casualties of all road user types and all severities. Work Package 7 of SafetyCube is dedicated to serious road traffic injuries, their health impacts and their costs. This Deliverable discusses health impacts of (serious) road traffic injuries

Stakeholder's contribution. Deliverable 1.3 of the EC FP7 Project DaCoTA

The aim of DaCoTA’s Work Package 1 is to shed light on road safety policy-making and management processes in Europe and to explore how these can be better supported by data and knowledge. This was done by assessing demands and views of stakeholders as well as by building a good practice model for road safety management investigation. Future versions of the European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO, www.erso.eu) are envisaged to be built on the findings of this project. This report describes the methodology and presents the first aggregated results of an on-line stakeholder consultation carried out in Task 1.3. The survey was successfully carried out among more than 3000 road safety stakeholders in Europe and beyond

Description of data-sources used in SafetyCube. Deliverable 3.1 of the H2020 project SafetyCube

Safety CaUsation, Benefits and Efficiency (SafetyCube) is a European Commission supported Horizon 2020 project with the objective of developing an innovative road safety Decision Support System (DSS) that will enable policy-makers and stakeholders to select and implement the most appropriate strategies, measures and cost-effective approaches to reduce casualties of all road user types and all severities. This deliverable describes the available data in the form of an inventory of databases that can be used for analyses within the project. Two general types of data are available: one describing the involvement of different components for the road safety (vehicles, infrastructure, and the road user) and one describing the injury outcomes of a crash. These two database categories are available to the partners of SafetyCube and gathered in two excel tables. One table contains traffic databases (accident and naturalistic driving studies) and the second table contains injury databases. The tables contain information on 58 and 35 variables, respectively. The key information describing the databases that was needed for the inventory were items such as: Type of data collected (crashes, injuries, etc.) Documentation of the variables Sampling criteria for the data collected SafetyCube partners with access to the data Extent of data access (raw data vs. summary tables) The tables contain 36 traffic accident databases, five naturalistic driving studies or field-tests and 22 injury databases where of four were coded in both sheets

Development of the European Road Safety Knowledge System

The objective of this paper is the presentation of the European Road Safety Knowledge System, which was developed within the DaCoTA research project of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. This knowledge system includes a number of components, concerning data and tools, road safety issues and countries. A wealth of data was gathered, on road fatalities, exposure, safety performance indicators, socioeconomic indicators, health and causation indicators, road user attitudes & behaviours, traffic laws and regulations, road safety management etc., for 30 European countries. This data was used in road safety analyses leading to the Basic Fact Sheets, and the Annual Statistical report. Comprehensive syntheses of the literature on important road safety issues and methodologies were carried out, in the form of web-texts. Country analyses were also carried out, including road safety management “profiles”, “country overviews” and country forecasts. These were integrated through a web-based Road Safety Knowledge System. This System can be a very useful support for road safety research in Europe, and ideal to link research and policy making.