A national approach to measuring non-fatal crash outcomes

This report documents an Austroads pilot project (Stage 1) to improve
the measurement and reporting of serious injury crashes by matching
crash and hospital data. The aim was to provide a proof of concept for
a national approach to supply routine data on non-fatal hospitalised
road injuries for reporting progress against the National Road Safety
Strategy 2011-2020 (NRSS) target of a 30 per cent reduction. A
serious injury is defined in the NRSS, and for the purposes of this
study, as a hospitalised case.
Neither crash data nor hospital data alone provides an adequate
national source of data for reporting progress against the NRSS target,
with linkage of hospital and police data recognised by road transport
agencies as integral to future reporting. The NSW linked data study
(Transport for NSW, 2017) showed the value of linking data.
Key outcomes of the Stage 1 project include successfully linking 2014
crash, hospital and National Death Index data for NSW, Victoria,
Queensland, and South Australia, and being granted permissions to
link data for the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory.
Permissions were not obtained from data custodians and ethics
committees for linked files with identifying information to be used by
road safety agencies.
Stage 1 has provided a proof of concept for a national approach, with a
case estimation process developed and applied, and statistical results
obtained. The report recommends proceeding with Stage 2 to extend
the process to Tasmania and Western Australia, and apply the method
to produce a series from 2008 to the latest year of data.