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A new report summarises initial work to link the Department for Transport’s data on road casualties reported to police (known as STATS19) with healthcare data, in what is hoped will be the first stage of a wider project. This report demonstrates the feasibility of linking police and ambulance data for a small subset of data for the South West region.
Currently, the main dataset for monitoring trends and patterns in road casualties in Great Britain is based on data collected by police, via a system known as STATS19. This data provides the basis for DfT’s published road casualty statistics. While overall the police reported data provides a valuable dataset for analysis:
- it has long been known that STATS19 is not a complete record of non-fatal road collisions (even for those that are in scope)
- STATS19 lacks detail on post-collision outcomes, including detailed clinical severity
Routinely linking police data with other datasets, notably health data, would help to address these limitations. However, while DfT and others have successfully linked STATS19 to individual datasets in the past, there does not currently exist a sustainable, comprehensive linkage of this nature, due to the challenges set out by the RAC Foundation in their report ‘Joining the Dots’.
