• Emmanuelle Amoros, Jean-Louis Martin, and Bernard Laumon.
• Epidemiological Research and Surveillance Unit in Transport, Occupation and Environment UMRESTTE, French National Institute for Transport and Safety Research INRETS, Bron, F-69500, France. amoros@inrets.fr <amoros@inrets.fr>
• Accid Anal Prev. 2007 May 1; 39 (3): 483-90.

IntroductionNon-fatal road casualties are under-reported, with official figures coming from the police. In the French Rhône county, a road trauma registry constitutes a second source of reporting but its completeness needs to be assessed. We also wish to estimate an incidence rate of non-fatal road casualties that is corrected for under-count.MethodsHaving two sources of reporting available, we can apply the capture-recapture method under certain conditions. To take into account different reporting probabilities among casualties, the capture-recapture analysis is stratified according to injury severity (New Injury Severity Score=NISS), road user type and human third party. To evaluate the sensitivity of the capture-recapture estimate on the number of matched casualties between the police file and the registry, three scenarios of record-linkage are considered.ResultsFor serious (NISS 9+) non-fatal road casualties, the police ascertainment rate is at most 57%, the registry ascertainment rate is at most 87%, and the aggregate ascertainment rate is at most 95%. The ascertainment-corrected incidence rate for serious (NISS 9+) non-fatal road casualties is at least 65 per 100,000.ConclusionThe degree of completeness of the registry for serious casualties is rather high, though not satisfactory.

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