The Role of the Surgeon in the Safe System

27 March 2024

In their March podcast The Role of the Surgeon in the Safe System , Project Edward talks to Seema Yalamanchili, a general surgeon in London and a clinical research fellow at Imperial studying road safety as part of her phd. They discuss how greater sharing of collision data - and medical information about crash victims - could lead to a better understanding of the causes and the costs – both human and financial – of death and injury on the country’s roads – and improve safety in the process.

Crash and casualty data is routinely collected by the police who attend incidents or are 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.