Under-reporting of motor vehicle traffic crash victims in New Zealand.

Our aim was to ascertain the extent of under-reporting of seriously injured motor vehicle traffic crash victims, as recorded by police in New Zealand, and to what extent this coverage was biased by crash, injury, demographic, and geographic factors. Hospital data and police records were linked using probabilistic methods. During 1995, less than two-thirds of all hospitalised vehicle occupant traffic crash victims were recorded by the police. Reporting rates varied significantly by age, injury severity, length of stay in hospital, month of crash, number of vehicles involved, whether or not a collision occurred, and geographic region, but not by gender, ethnicity or day of the week of the crash. Those using these police files for prioritization, resource allocation and evaluation purposes need to be aware of the extent and nature of these biases contained within these databases.

[1]  R D Stone.  COMPUTER LINKAGE OF TRANSPORT AND HEALTH DATA , 1984 .

[2]  R J Tunbridge.  THE USE OF LINKED TRANSPORT-HEALTH ROAD CASUALTY DATA , 1987 .

[3]  D. Hosmer,et al.  Applied Logistic Regression , 1991 .

[4]  D Fife,et al.  Regional variation in motor vehicle accident reporting: findings from Massachusetts. , 1989, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[5]  A Woodward.  Motorcycle accidents in Nottinghamshire. , 1983, Public health.

[6]  B S Shankar,et al.  Helmet use, patterns of injury, medical outcome, and costs among motorcycle drivers in Maryland. , 1992, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[7]  L R Salmi,et al.  Road accident statistics: discrepancies between police and hospital data in a French island. , 1999, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[8]  S Harris,et al.  The real number of road traffic accident casualties in The Netherlands: a year-long survey. , 1990, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[9]  Arthur H. Keeney,et al.  American Association for Automotive Medicine , 1968 .

[10]  D Fife,et al.  Discrepancies in vehicular crash injury reporting: Northeastern Ohio Trauma Study. IV. , 1985, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[11]  F. Jones,et al.  International Classification of Diseases , 1978 .

[12]  L Schelp,et al.  Road traffic accidents in a Swedish municipality. , 1990, Public health.

[13]  James L. Dolby,et al.  An Algorithm for Variable-Length Proper-Name Compression , 1970 .

[14]  J. A. Hobbs,et al.  CLASSIFICATION OF INJURY SEVERITY BY LENGTH OF STAY IN HOSPITAL , 1979 .

[15]  M W Knuiman,et al.  A comparison of hospital and police road injury data. , 1994, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[16]  Stephen Harris,et al.  POLICE RECORDING OF ROAD ACCIDENT IN-PATIENTS. INVESTIGATION INTO THE COMPLETENESS, REPRESENTATIVITY, AND RELIABILITY OF POLICE RECORDS OF HOSPITALIZED TRAFFIC VICTIMS , 1984 .

[17]  Karl Kim,et al.  APPLICATION OF AUTOMATED RECORDS LINKAGE SOFTWARE IN TRAFFIC RECORDS ANALYSIS , 1994 .

[18]  Dorothy Jean Begg,et al.  Motorcycle fatalities in New Zealand: a database linkage study , 1993 .

[19]  T Kjellstrom,et al.  A comparison of hospital admissions data and official government statistics of serious traffic accident injuries. , 1987, The New Zealand medical journal.