@article{ref1,
title="Police-reported pedestrian crash matching and injury severity misclassification by body region in New Mexico, USA",
journal="Accident analysis and prevention",
year="2022",
author="Ferenchak, Nicholas N. and Osofsky, Robin B.",
volume="167",
number="",
pages="e106573-e106573",
abstract="Between 2009 and 2019, pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. increased 51.0% while all other traffic fatalities increased 0.4%. To mitigate pedestrian safety issues, practitioners increasingly use police-reported data to identify and treat locations that experience either serious or fatal injuries. We investigated how many and which types of pedestrian injuries were misclassified by police-reported data in New Mexico between 2014 and 2018 by matching pedestrian-vehicle crash victims reported in New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT) crash data to patients treated at University of New Mexico Health-Science Center, an American College of Surgeons-certified level 1 trauma center (n = 3097 pedestrians in NMDOT data; n = 512 matched pedestrians). <br><br>FINDINGS suggest that injuries involving older pedestrians, males, alcohol, more serious injuries, and those that occur at night are more likely to match to the hospital data. Of the non-fatally injured pedestrians who police estimated as seriously-injured (n = 207), 21.7% were no more than minorly-injured (n = 45) (KABCO A and ISS < 9). Of pedestrians who police estimated as minorly-injured (n = 239), 55.6% were seriously-injured (n = 133) (KABCO B,C,O and ISS ≥ 9). Of pedestrians with true serious injuries (n = 295) (ISS ≥ 9), 45.1% were under-estimated by police (n = 133) (KABCO B,C,O and ISS ≥ 9) whereas 29.8% of pedestrians with true minor injuries (n = 151) (ISS < 9) were over-estimated by police (n = 45) (KABCO A and ISS < 9). Minorly-injured pedestrians who were over-estimated by police (KABCO A and ISS < 9) were more likely to have lower extremity injuries (62.2% vs 42.5%, p-value = 0.013) compared to minorly-injured pedestrians whose injury severities were estimated correctly (KABCO B,C,O and ISS < 9). Seriously-injured pedestrians who were under-estimated (KABCO B,C,O and ISS ≥ 9) were less likely to have injuries to the head (39.8% vs. 55.6%, p-value = 0.003), spine (30.1% vs. 50.0%, p-value < 0.001), thorax (53.4% vs. 66.7%, p-value = 0.0139), or abdomen (18.8% vs. 32.1%, p-value = 0.005) compared to seriously-injured pedestrians whose injury severities were estimated correctly (KABCO A and ISS ≥ 9). This research illustrates the importance of linking police and health outcome databases to provide a more complete understanding of traffic safety.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0001-4575",
doi="10.1016/j.aap.2022.106573",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2022.106573"
}