Lead agencies

Austroads, BITRE and Flinders University

Enduring question 4.4

How, when, why and in what numbers do people get injured, or die on Australia's roads?

Gap addressed

Nationally consistent source of non-fatal road injury data.

Background

There is currently a lack of a reliable, nationally consistent, source of non-fatal crash data. National level data on road-injury related hospital admissions exists, but this gives limited details of the crashes (e.g. location and vehicles involved).

Objective

Providing non-fatal road injury data by linking crash data (collected by jurisdictions), hospital data and deaths data.

Project update

BITRE is managing an Austroads project, with Flinders University as principal investigators, to provide proof of concept for a national approach to supply routine national data on non- fatal hospitalised road injuries in Australia. While some jurisdictions have undertaken their own linkage projects, this project aims to provide the key benefit of a nationally consistent approach.

This project is currently completing Stage 1 (pilot) including obtaining permission from custodians to link crash data (collected by jurisdictions), hospital data and deaths data (to avoid double counting), using Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Data Linking Unit to link data and analysis of linked data (for example, investigating issues such as cross- border flows).

Transport and Infrastructure Ministers agreed in November 2017 to proceed with Stage 2, development of a historical linked data series, and Stage 3, ongoing annual updates of linked data. This linked data should enable nationally consistent reporting of a linked hospitalised injury series.

Related publication

Project outputs are expected to include published reports, conference papers and journal papers covering process, method and results.