Injury severity codes: a comparison of police injury codes and medical outcomes as determined by NASS CDS Investigators.

The severity of a highway crash can be described in terms of the severity of injuries to crash victims. However, the accuracy and reliability of scoring systems used by police officers at the scene of a crash have been questioned. This short paper, from the Traffic Records Forum, held in Buffalo, NY in 2005, reports on a study that used the National Automotive Sampling System (NASS) Crashworthiness Data System (CDS) samples of tow-away crashes of passenger vehicles at 24 sites in the United States. The authors gather crash information, the occupant's medical outcome, and the officer's KABCO score (used since 1966) and the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS, introduced in 1990). In this study, the police-assigned KABCO scores for 101,580 motor-vehicle occupants of case vehicles with 288,286 injuries were examined to determine the accuracy with which the offices identified injury severity. The results showed that police officers at the scene of the crash do a good job of identifying the injury severity of the victims. Errors results from obvious injuries that appear worse than they are (particularly injuries that bleed profusely), or from injuries that are not evident. The authors conclude that the police injury scale appears to be an appropriate tool to use to discriminate the more serious crashes from the multitude of minor crashes.