Optimisation of traffic accident statistics

The OPTIMA project or the “Optimisation of traffic accident statistics”, initiated by the DWTC1, is part of a strategy to obtain the necessary means to establish a traffic safety policy. A policy on traffic safety should be a reliable and representative reflection of safety issues. This makes traffic accident data an essential element in making policy decisions on traffic safety. In this sense, the availability of reliable and representative statistical material is the basis upon which traffic safety policy must be founded. The project objective is to obtain more complete and more representative traffic accident statistics by linking hospital records with existing police records and comparing the hospital data with available police information. Part 1 of the project, the description of the existing situation, goes through a series of steps. The introductory text explores the problem of the current incom-pleteness of recorded data in Belgium. This is followed by an international investigation of recording methods in the Nether-lands, Sweden, Great Britain and the USA. This section provides a more detailed description of hospital records and the concurrence between hospital and police records. In the following report the current Belgian process for hospital records, as well as the pro-cedure through which the hospital notifies the police will be set out. This part will end with a series of policy suggestions, based on the description of the weaknesses of the existing formalities for records. Part 2 of the project outlines a demonstration record system for traffic casualties in hospitals. The aim is to introduce this demo into an emergency admission service and to extend it to a day clinic at a later stage. At the same time, the possibility of coupling hospital data with police data will be explored. Foreign experience with traffic casualty records will be put to use in this experiment. Alongside the de-monstration, the possibility of recording traffic casualties through primary care services will also be examined. ...