RAC Foundation Report – Joining the data dots to reduce road deaths

A new report has been published by Seema Yalamanchili, a general surgeon and clinical research fellow at the Imperial College London Institute of Global Health Innovation title ‘Data Linkage in Road Safety – Bridging the divide to support better health outcomes’‘. The report found that greater sharing of collision data and medical information about crash victims could lead to a much better understanding of the causes and the costs – human and financial – of death and injury on the country’s roads, and hence improve safety.

Crash and casualty data is routinely collected by the police who attend most major incidents or are at least made aware of them. It is then published by the Department for Transport through a system called STATS19.

However, to get a more rounded picture of collisions and harm on the road network this should be better linked to other sources of data, particularly injury data collected in the national medical dataset, Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), and that recorded by the ambulance service and other parties involved in the aftermath of road crashes.

Ultimately, those all those working in the road safety arena – not least those involved in health provision, law enforcement, transport policy and vehicle design – would benefit from greater data co-ordination and cross-referencing.