Overview
In order to provide efficient tools to promote the analysis of risk factors associated with the severity of injury and good practice in safety interventions, the project LIVE aims to develop a data system which results from the linkage of medical information to the police accident report.
The project outcomes will provide knowledge to define measures relating to the road environment and their influence on pedestrian accidents, and promote an efficient management system for the emergency services. To develop this project a great deal of effort is required to process data. In addition, a modelling process will be required to analyse the effects of different types of variables on the severity of injury and post-injury service.
To accomplish the EC goal of reducing the number of serious road injuries, the LIVE project developed a methodology to classify the severity of injury according to MAIS, the standard injury severity classification adopted by EC.
Three methods proposed by the EC were tested using Porto region data in order to exemplify each one and to provide knowledge and tools to enable the EU Member States to apply them.
The first method suggested by the EC looks at the application of adjustment coefficients. Under the LIVE project, a novel methodology was developed to produce non-fatality adjustment coefficients to estimate the total casualties taking into account underreporting and misclassification of data.
The second method looks solely the hospital data set. Using an algorithm the ICD codes are converted in AIS/MAIS. This method provides a superior estimation of the number of casualties but does not look into the circumstances of the accident.
The third method depends on the outcomes of the linkage process to match the accuracy the victims’ records reported by the police with the hospital inpatient data. In this study, 41% of the records were matched.
Funding
Results
An emergency medical system framework was created assuming several assumptions such as:
- A demand model that took into account all types of emergency calls (i.e. not just accident emergency calls); and the possibility to segregate the demographics of road accident calls from other types of EMS calls –dynamic versus static demand.
- Three planning phases: long term of facility location, mid-term of vehicles interchange/reallocate, and short-term vehicle dispatching and reallocation.
- The time and space randomness of the emergency calls and their priority.