The purposes of the follow-up retrospective study presented in this scientific poster are to identify all traffic deaths in Barcelona, Spain from police and health information sources, and to examine underreported traffic deaths from police data and the factors related to this. Data were obtained from: the Mortality Registry (MR), the Forensic Institute (FI), and from the local police registry (GUB)). In 1997, the three information sources identified a total number of 161 traffic deaths, of which 157 came from the Fl, 144 came from the MR and 56 came from the GUB. The main reason for disagreement among the MR and the FI was related to the lack of specific coding in the cause of death in the MR. The high agreement in the traffic deaths cases included in forensic and mortality sources observed, together with the fact that almost all deaths registered by the local police are also identified in the health sources, indicates that most traffic deaths in Barcelona are registered in the studied information sources. However, the ability to adequately monitor deaths resulting from traffic crashes in the city is limited. This could be improved through the systematic inclusion of information on place of occurrence of the traffic crash in forensic sources, together with a review of hospital discharge records to identity deaths that may have occurred beyond the first days after the crash and not included in the police registry.
Samenvatting