Annually within the European Union, there are over 40,000 road accident fatalities and 1.6 million other casualties and the majority of these are either the occupants of cars or are in collision with a car. The European Commission now has competency for vehicle-based injury countermeasures through the Whole Vehicle Type Approval system. As a result of this, the Commission has recently recognised that casualty reduction strategies must be based on a full understanding of the real-world accident data in conditions broadly representative of the European Union and that vehicle safety countermeasure effectiveness must be properly evaluated. To this effect, the PENDANT study (short for Pan-European Co-ordinated Accident and Injury Databases) commenced in January 2003. This study is developing a co-ordinated set of targeted, in-depth crash data resources to support European Union vehicle and road safety policy. Over the course of the next three years, around 1100 investigations of crashes involving injured car occupants will be conducted in eight EU countries to a common protocol. The data will be further enhanced by the linking of hospital and police information to provide additional data on the trends and injury patterns of over 60,000 road users of all types. Part of the responsibilities of the PENDANT work-programme (included in Work Package 1) is to consider an appropriate method for evaluating injury severity in crashes. Injuries in general are a serious problem common to all societies (Baker et al1) and therefore classification of them according to severity is an important process in determining the burden in terms of both outcomes and societal costs. The use of injury scales enables statistical analyses of injuries for comparative purposes and allows predictive outcomes such as mortality in vehicle safety engineering research. Such research has a need for very detailed clinical injury information in order to develop surrogate biofidelic humans to assess preventative measures. Knowledge of injury mechanisms are an intrinsic requirement of vehicle safety research and to a limited degree, such mechanisms should ideally be detectable and reproducible in anthropomorphic crash dummies so that injury risk can be comprehensively assessed in laboratory crash-tests. The objectives of this report are therefore as follows: • To assess and quantify current available injury scales; • To assess the suitability of available injury scales for the PENDANT project; • To develop an implementation plan for incorporating injury coding and injury scaling methods into the PENDANT work-programme. (Author/publisher)
Abstract