Samenvatting
Many road safety research projects make use of official police road accident data. Their use is often restricted to the data on fatal and fatal accidents because it is the only complete registration, and the extent of underreporting of injury accidents is unknown. The incomplete police data on road accidents in-patients was compared with the hospital discharge data to establish how representative it was. The general structures of the police and hospital data were similar but there were differences. Police data are reliable for time series and for period studies of most mode of transport/age group combinations.