Journal of Safety Research

Journal of Safety Research

Volume 58, September 2016, Pages 1-14
Journal of Safety Research

Record linkage for road traffic injuries in Ireland using police hospital and injury claims data

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2016.05.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • •

    This paper uses data matching techniques to match three independent road safety databases.

  • •

    The results show the problem of under reporting of accidents.

Abstract

Introduction

The study of non-fatal road traffic injuries is growing in importance. Since there are rarely comprehensive injury datasets, it is necessary to combine different sources to obtain better estimates on the extent and nature of the problem. Record linkage is one such technique.

Method

In this study, anonymized datasets from three separate sources of injury data in Ireland: hospitals, police, and injury claims are linked using probabilistic and deterministic linkage techniques. A method is proposed that creates a ‘best’ set of linked records for analysis, useful when clerical review of undecided cases is not feasible.

Results

The linkage of police and hospital datasets shows results that are similar to those found in other countries, with significant police understatement especially of cyclist and motorcyclist injuries. The addition of the third dataset identifies a large number of additional injuries and demonstrates the error of using only the two main sources for injury data.

Practical application

The study also underlines the risk in relying on the Lincoln–Petersen capture–recapture estimator to provide an estimate of the total population concerned.

Conclusion

The data show that road traffic injuries are significantly more numerous than either police or hospital sources indicate. It is also argued that no single measure can fully capture the range of impacts that a serious injury entails.

Section snippets

Introduction and background

There are several reasons why traffic injuries are becoming more central to road safety policy. First, significant progress has been made in reducing fatalities with many countries almost halving the number of fatalities in the last decade; however injuries have not declined as rapidly (Table 1). Second, the social costs of injuries are very significant and at least as large as the costs of fatalities (Department for Transport UK, 2012a, Ministry of Transport New Zealand, 2012, SWOV, 2014).

Background and applications in road safety

Record or data linkage involves bringing together corresponding records from two or more files (Winkler, 1999). According to Felligi (1997), it began in the 1960s, with the production of large files about individuals in different domains, as well as the increased role of government in data collection and analysis and the rapid development of computer technology. The use of record linkage in road safety research and practice is relatively recent and has served different objectives. It has been

Data sources and linkage variables

This paper uses three data sources — police, hospitals, and the Injuries Board. For each source, individual anonymized data were available. Police and hospital data were obtained for the years 2005–2011 and for the Injuries Board data were available only for the years 2010–2011.

The three data sources separately provide valuable comparative information on aspects of the injury problem. The data show different structures and composition by age, gender, county, and severity. The large size of the

Police–hospital linkage, 2005–2011

Table 4 presents summary information on the results of the record linkage between police and hospital data over the period 2005–2011. The table shows, in the first three data columns, for the different road user categories, the number of cases in the police and hospital datasets as well as the number of matches as calculated by the method set out in Section 2.3 above. Then the aggregate number of distinct cases, which is the sum of the number of police and hospital cases minus the number of

Discussion and conclusions

The following discussion examines first some limitations of the methods and data presented above. Then the results are summarized and some policy implications are drawn out.

Acknowledgments

The Road Safety Authority, the Injuries Board and the Economic and Social Research Institute are thanked for the provision of the data for this work. Thanks are also due to the anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions.

Jack Short has been an expert on transport policy internationally for over 25 years. He is currently conducting research on road safety at Trinity College Dublin. Formerly he was the Secretary General of the International Transport Forum, an OECD affiliated intergovernmental organization in Paris. In Ireland he previously worked in the Central Statistics Office, the Departments of Transport and Finance and the Economic and Social Research Institute.

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    • Cited by (0)

    Jack Short has been an expert on transport policy internationally for over 25 years. He is currently conducting research on road safety at Trinity College Dublin. Formerly he was the Secretary General of the International Transport Forum, an OECD affiliated intergovernmental organization in Paris. In Ireland he previously worked in the Central Statistics Office, the Departments of Transport and Finance and the Economic and Social Research Institute.

    Dr. Brian Caulfield is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, Trinity College Dublin. He has been active in transport research for over 10 years and currently leads a number of EPA and EU FP7 projects. He has published over 40 international peer reviewed journal papers and has presented at over 50 national and international conferences. Dr. Caulfield is also the current chair of the Irish Transport Research Network.

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