The Identification of Mistakes in Road Accident Records – Part Two.

It has been acknowledged that there are many mistakes in the casualty variables on the police accident report forms. This study shows how a computer based linkage of police and hospital records can be used to routinely identify the mistakes for the variables of casualty age, gender and severity. The level of omissions and mis-identifications were 0.4 per cent for gender, 13.3 per cent for severity and 15.7 per cent for age. The number of records that had age omitted or coded incorrectly were not significantly greater for seriously injured casualties than for those that were slightly injured. The system could be effectively used to code casualty severity using medical information instead of relying on police judgement.