A previous study for Transport for London (TfL) had taken three hospitals in London and matched their road traffic casualty data with the STATS 19 police records for the same areas. The hospitals were St Mary's Paddington, representing Central London, King's College Hospital Camberwell, representing Inner London, and Barnet General Hospital, representing Outer London. The results indicate that the percentage of road traffic casualties known to the police in London through the STATS 19 data collection process is higher than found by other studies elsewhere in the country (see for example Simpson 1996, Ward et al 1994, Robertson and Ward 2002)) with the King's area being about 71 percent, Barnet about 70 percent and St Mary's about 87 percent. This latter figure was considered to be high even for London so a second Central London hospital, St Thomas' was chosen in order to estimate the reporting rate in this area which forms the basis of this study. Using the same methodology and time period (2001) as in the first study it was estimated that the reporting rate for St Thomas' was about 79 percent. This is considerably higher than Bamet and King's but lower than St Mary's. The table on the following page combines results from both studies and shows estimates of the headline percentage reporting rates to the police for the four hospital areas. The indications are that there is a Central London effect which increases the reporting rate. Two possible explanations for this are: 1) If a casualty feels well enough to continue home and once there they feel the need for treatment, they will go to the local hospital near where they live and not back to the Central London Hospital near where they were injured. Therefore, for this unquantified group of people, their injury may be in the police record for the study area and in the record of some other hospital unknown to us but not the hospital record being studied. This would have the effect of increasing the proportion of casualties known to the police relative to the number of all known casualties and thus increase the estimated reporting rate. 2) The level of police presence and awareness of traffic incidents in Central London means that when a road traffic accident occurs the police are on the scene very quickly, thus making it more likely that the accident will be reported and appear in the STATS 19 record. Based on the proportion of road traffic accident casualties to all A&E attendances at the four hospitals studied, it was concluded that the St Mary's Hospital record for road traffic accident casualties was about half what might be expected based on its total number of A&E attendances. This suggests that the dataset used in the original study may not have been complete, leading to a higher than average estimated reporting rate. The total number of road traffic casualties attending the 33 London hospitals with full time A&E departments was estimated to be about 44 700 people, there were 44 500 casualties reported to the police. The total number of road traffic casualties in London in 2001 is therefore estimated to be about 68 500. (Author/publisher)
Abstract