The National Road Safety Strategy 2011—2020 (NRSS) presents a 10-year plan to reduce the annual numbers of both deaths and serious injuries on Australian roads by at least 30 per cent. Australia’s performance in addressing serious injuries from road crashes is difficult to measure because of the lack of a reliable, nationally consistent, source of non-fatal crash data. This information sheet details the current potentially relevant data sources, their limitations, and efforts currently underway to improve data for Australian serious injury reporting. While not part of NRSS reporting, the Bureau of Transport, Infrastructure and Regional Economics (BITRE) publishes national data on the number of hospitalised injury cases sourced from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). This data serves as a broad indicator of likely trends in serious injuries, but does not include any detailed crash information. While road deaths have declined steadily, hospital data suggests the number of road traffic injuries has increased. Of those hospitalised, the number of people with high threat to life injuries has also increased. There is no national agreed count of ‘serious injury’ cases for NRSS reporting purposes. The crash data collected by police in the eight different states and territories cannot currently be aggregated to a suitable national injury measure. Ideally a national serious injury measure would reflect a range of personal impacts from injury crashes, by including cases above a threshold level of severity but also cases with a threshold level of disability from crashes. Severity scoring systems are used in the health sector to measure threat to life, but have not been shown to be good indicators of the level of disability resulting from injury. Models to predict injury disability outcomes are currently being developed. There are clear potential benefits to using hospital data to supplement crash data, and international research supports the data linkage approach. Hospital data offers the opportunity to report national serious injury totals using standardised severity ratings that are based on medical diagnosis, allowing in-depth understanding of medical consequences of particular types of crashes. A data linkage study completed in NSW has confirmed that many crash-related injuries, particularly pedal cyclists and motorcyclists, are not reported to police and so do not appear in the crash data. Consistent with a priority action in the National Road Safety Action Plan 2015 to 2017, a project has been established to test the strengths and limitations of adopting a data linkage approach at the national level. The development of nationally consistent non-fatal crash data is vital to our understanding of the nature and impact of serious injury crashes on the Australian community and will underpin the development of the shared policy response of Australian governments. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting