Casualties are reported in many different ways in different countries. Definitions and report rates vary, which makes international comparison difficult. For years, the European Commission has been striving for a harmonised definition, based on road crash casualties with MAIS3+ injuries. After the Dutch 2020 targets for the number of serious road injuries, with a definition of MAIS2+ severity, had expired, the Netherlands also adopted the definition in which serious road injuries should at least have a MAIS3 severity. Quite a number of countries encounter problems in collecting the necessary data (police and hospital data) and performing the required data editing to determine the number of serious road injuries (MAIS3+). In 2014, the European Commission did give a first-time estimate of the number of serious road injuries in Europe: 135,000 [26].
Also at a European level, research is done on MAIS3+ casualties. In 2016, the report Study on serious road traffic injuries in the EU [27], was published, which focuses on data and circumstances of the crashes of MAIS3+ casualties among pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and car occupants. The EU-project SafetyCube investigated the differences in methods used in countries to determine their numbers of MAIS3+ casualties, and how these methods affect the estimated numbers [28]. This EU project also studied the injury consequences [29] and the societal costs of serious road injuries [30].
