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Burden of injury of serious road injuries in six EU countries

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-12-15, 13:45 authored by Wendy Weijermars, Niels Bos, Ashleigh FiltnessAshleigh Filtness, Laurie BrownLaurie Brown, Robert Bauer, Emmanuelle Dupont, Jean-Louis Martin, Katherine Perez, Pete Thomas
BACKGROUND: Information about the burden of (non-fatal) road traffic injury is very useful to further improve road safety policy. Previous studies calculated the burden of injury in individual countries. This paper estimates and compares the burden of non-fatal serious road traffic injuries in six EU countries/regions: Austria, Belgium, England, The Netherlands, the Rhône region in France and Spain. METHODS: It is a cross-sectional study based on hospital discharge databases. POPULATION: of study are patients hospitalized with MAIS3+ due to road traffic injuries. The burden of injury (expressed in years lived with disability (YLD)) is calculated applying a method that is developed within the INTEGRIS study. The method assigns estimated disability information to the casualties using the EUROCOST injury classification. RESULTS: The average burden per MAIS3+ casualty varies between 2.4 YLD and 3.2 YLD per casualty. About 90% of the total burden of injury of MAIS3+ casualties is due to lifelong consequences that are experienced by 19% to 33% of the MAIS3+ casualties. Head injuries, spinal cord injuries and injuries to the lower extremities are responsible for more than 90% of the total burden of MAIS3+ road traffic injuries. Results per transport mode differ between the countries. Differences between countries are mainly due to differences in age distribution and in the distribution over EUROCOST injury groups of the casualties. CONCLUSION: The analyses presented in this paper can support further improvement of road safety policy. Countermeasures could for example be focused at reducing skull and brain injuries, spinal cord injuries and injuries to the lower extremities, as these injuries are responsible for more than 90% of the total burden of injury of MAIS3+ casualties.

Funding

This paper is based on work carried out within the SafetyCube project of the H2020 programme of the European Commission (Grant number 633485).

History

School

  • Design and Creative Arts

Department

  • Design

Published in

Accident Analysis & Prevention

Volume

111

Pages

184 - 192

Citation

WEIJERMARS, W. ...et al., 2018. Burden of injury of serious road injuries in six EU countries. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 111, pp. 184-192.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-11-28

Publication date

2017-12-07

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2017.11.040

ISSN

0001-4575

eISSN

1879-2057

Language

  • en

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