Cookson 1 PEDESTRIAN INJURY CHARACTERISTICS FOLLOWING ROAD TRAFFIC COLLISIONS

The paper outlines the nature and severity of the injuries suffered by pedestrians in motor vehicle accidents in England. Pedestrian admissions to hospitals in England as recorded in the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) over a nine year period were compared with accidents recorded in Great Britain’s national road casualties database (STATS19). Alongside this, the most frequently injured regions and individual injuries of the pedestrians were investigated. The relationship between individual injuries and the length of time spent at hospital was investigated. The changes in frequency of individual injuries were investigated to see whether recent changes in vehicle design could have altered the types of injuries received by pedestrian casualties. The HES data from April 1998 to March 2007 in England contained details of 82,811 pedestrian admissions following accidents involving motor vehicles. In the same time period there were 65,526 killed or seriously injured pedestrians recorded in the STATS19 database. It was found that over the nine year period, the number of pedestrian casualties in HES remained relatively constant, while the number in STATS19 has reduced. In this period, HES data shows that tibia and femur fractures have reduced slightly. This could be due to a number of factors including improved vehicle design. The nature of the HES data means that very little information is included about the characteristics of the accident, which prevents possible causes of pedestrian injuries to be studied using the HES dataset by itself. However, this paper shows the potential of hospital data as an important tool in accident research, as the injury information can give evidence of the effects of the changing vehicle fleet, along with other road safety interventions. Further, through an in-depth understanding of the frequency and consequences of different injuries, future injury prevention strategies can be prioritised. INTRODUCTION Every year in the UK thousands of people are killed and tens of thousands are seriously injured in traffic accidents. As well as the personal tragedy of these events, road traffic accidents have economic implications. An understanding of how injuries occur in accidents is sought in order to implement ideas to try and mitigate them, and a major part of gaining this understanding is looking at national level statistics. The importance of these statistics is such that they can affect Government and local authority initiatives, policy, spending and legislation, and even vehicle manufacturing decisions. Hence the need for them to be accurate and reliable is prevalent. This project presents an opportunity to investigate two such sources of national statistics: the data recorded by the Police (STATS19) and the data recorded by the hospitals (Hospital Episode Statistics). While the purpose of STATS19 is to record traffic accidents, recording details of traffic casualties is only a small part of the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). As such, only limited accident analysis has been performed using HES in the past. This paper provides the opportunity to investigate how HES can be used in accident investigation, and how it relates to STATS19. Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) Hospital Episode Statistics are compiled by the Department of Health and record details of all hospital admissions, finished consultant episodes and hospital discharges for England. Data of this type has been collected since 1989, with its main purpose being to ensure correct funding of hospitals from their Primary Care Trust (PCT) [1]. HES contain data such as age, sex, dates of admission and discharge, diagnoses, operations and procedures, place of residence and ethnicity, with approximately 12 million new records being added each year. Information regarding the diagnosis of injury and its causation is coded using the ‘International Classification of Diseases’ (ICD), of which the latest version ICD-10 has been used since 1995. Injuries