The objective of Task 1.5 of the SafetyNet IP has been to estimate the actual numbers of road accident casualties in Europe from the CARE database by addressing two issues: • the under-reporting in national accident databases and • the differences between countries of the definitions used to classify injury severity. Currently, the only comparable measurement units available in CARE are the numbers of fatal accidents and of people killed, where the degree of under-reporting is acceptably small in most EU Member States and there is a common definition. The same is not true, however, of non-fatal accidents and of casualties who are not killed. As a result, at present the numbers of non-fatal accidents and of people seriously and slightly injured cannot be compared in different Member States. In addition, the definition of injury severity differs among member states, so that a casualty which would be recorded in one country might not be recorded in another. Equally, a casualty which might be recorded as ‘seriously’ injured in one country might be recorded as ‘slightly’ injured in another. As a result of this lack of comparability, international comparisons of road safety focus entirely on fatal accidents and fatalities, which form only a small minority of the totals. It is highly desirable to extend these comparisons to include the full range of injury severities. The objective of Task 1.5 has been to allow this to happen. In order to overcome the inconsistencies in the reporting of non-fatal casualties, this Task has: 1. estimated the under-reporting level for non-fatal casualties by developing a uniform methodology and applying it in several EU countries, 2. estimated the number of serious casualties per country according to a new common measurement unit. This report documents the results that have been achieved. (Author/publisher)
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