Colin Buchanan was commissioned by the Department of the Environment's Road Safety Division to: - carry out a systematic literature review of recent (last 10 years) published and unpublished key research relevant to the project (UK or Irish only) - carry out a 10 year analysis of available PSNI casualty data for child pedestrian casualties aged 0-15 years - determine whether or not there is evidence suggesting a link between child pedestrian casualties in NI and the deprivation of the area (as measured by the Northern Ireland Multiple Deprivation Measure (NIMDM) in which the collisions occurred, and: - if there is evidence suggesting a link then a statistical model should be developed to measure the effect of deprivation, taking account of environmental factors. The reliability of this model should be assessed - if there is no evidence of a link then outline the reasons why this might be the case (i.e. any data issues or NI-specific factors which mean that the deprivation effect is not as prevalent here as in the rest of the UK). The study was based on demographic and infrastructure data for each of the 890 Census Super Output Areas (SOAs) and road collision data for the period 1999-2008 supplied by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). The road collision data comprised records for 64,651 collisions involving 109,385 casualties of which 8,829 were pedestrians. The number of child pedestrian casualties was 3,235. In addition to the ten year dataset, a two year dataset was provided by the PSNI for the period April 2007 – March 2009 (inclusive). Postcode information relating to casualties has been recorded by the PSNI since April 2007. This allowed an analysis to take place of how the location of collision and location of residence of the casualty are distributed and whether or not – for the ten year data – the location of collision could be used as a proxy for location of residence of the casualty. The literature review of research indicated a strong link between deprivation and child pedestrian rates. A few of the studies had been undertaken using the same collision data for England and drew very similar conclusions: these – although self-supporting - could not be viewed as being wholly independent of each other. Other research projects where independent STATS19 data sources for Welsh and Scottish collisions were reviewed together with some hospital admission data for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These projects reported strong links between deprivation and casualty rates. Other points emanating from the review of relevance the study included - the risk of serious injury or death in a road collision increases with increasing deprivation - the individual factors which make up an index of multiple deprivation are also linked to child pedestrian casualty rates but with different statistical relationships - other variables, such as population, road infrastructure, employment density, weather (rainfall and sunshine hours) are also found to be linked to child pedestrian casualty rates - some research indicated that it is acceptable to use location of accident as a proxy for place of residence for child pedestrian casualties. (Author/publisher)
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