A new study has found discrepancies between crash reports and hospital data which could paint an incomplete or inaccurate picture of how crashes impact the safety of child passengers.
Traffic crashes remain the leading cause of unintentional injury and death for young children, and approximately 80 per cent involve children riding as passengers in motor vehicles.
Researchers from the Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) used data from the New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes (NJ-SHO) Data Warehouse and identified child passengers under the age of 13 involved in a crash from 2017 through 2019 and compared their injuries documented in both crash and hospital reports.
They characterized injury frequency, severity and location, as well as the frequency of injuries by age and restraint type.
Of 84,060 crash-involved child passengers, the researchers found that crash reports documented 7,858 (nine per cent) children with at least “possible” injuries. However, only 2,577 (three per cent) of all the crash-involved child passengers had at least one documented injury in hospital reports.
“Our study demonstrated crash-involved child passengers’ injury information, specifically injury frequency, location, and severity, are reported differently across crash reports and hospital records,” said first study author Emma Sartin, PhD, MPH, CPST, research scientist with the NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data at CHOP.
“This could misrepresent our understanding of how many children are injured in crashes, as well as the types of injuries they may experience. Since this information is often used to allocate funding for traffic safety efforts and programs, its inaccuracy can also lead to funding being misdirected away from the communities that may need it most.”
