Review of Police Road Casualty Injury Severity Classification – A Feasibility Study

In July 2009 the UK Statistics Authority reviewed the STATS19 dataset of road
accidents reported to the police. It found areas of weakness that should be reviewed,
one of which was the classification of severity of injury of road casualties.

The Department for Transport commissioned this review of injury severity classification in order to assess whether the police could be helped to distinguish more serious injuries from the less serious consistently, and how this might be achieved.

The specific aims and objectives of the study were to:
• Understand how the police currently assign injury severity.
• Assess the feasibility of improving the classification of the existing police definition of serious injury.
• Review medical evidence on the range of serious and slight injuries, their frequency and type, and develop sub-categories of serious injuries that have medical validity but would be practical for a non-specialist police officer to assign.
• Provide a recommended set of sub-categories for the existing serious category that has been successfully piloted with a range of police officers.

Accurate measurement of ‘severe’ road casualties is essential to guide the development and evaluation of national and local road safety strategies and to target interventions at high-risk locations.

The rationale behind this study was to determine whether collecting a small number of additional data items would assist in distinguishing slight from severe injuries and provide more reliable statistics.