Road safety agencies require accurate, reliable and timely road crash information to support the development and evaluation of initiatives underpinning the current "Towards Zero" Road Safety Strategy.
Information about crashes, vehicles, drivers, roads, injuries and payments are all collected by different agencies. In recognition of the need to assemble all the available information for analysis, the WA Road Safety Council has funded a project to link and analyse information from WA Health, Main Roads WA, Insurance Commission of WA and trauma records.
The objective of this project is to create and maintain data linkages to connect motor vehicle crash reports and third party insurance claims to the core health-related datasets. These road safety linkages are managed separately from the core WADLSThe Western Australian Data Linkage System creates and stores links within and between the stateÕs health data collections. The WADLS does not contain any clinical or service data, rather it consists of groups of links called chains. linkages and are available for use in a variety of road safety related research projects.
A crash and injury analysis project is also being undertaken through the Public Health Division at the WA Department of Health. This project has been cleared by an ethics committee but is classed as a quality assurance/monitoring project. Other research or analysis projects will need to be approved by an institutional or Department of Health WA HRECHuman Research Ethics Committee. The WA Department of Health HREC was formed in 2008 to consider applications for DOHWA health data. See the DOHWA HREC website: http://www.health.wa.gov.au/healthdata/HREC/index.cfm.
For more information regarding this project please contact Laura Miller at laura.j.miller2@health.wa.gov.au