Assessment of the opportunities for increasing the availability of EU data on consumer product-related injuries

The availability of data on consumer products-related accidents and injuries is of interest to a wide range of stakeholders, such as consumer product safety and injury prevention policymakers, market surveillance authorities, consumer organisations, standardisation organisations, manufacturers and the public. While the amount of information available and potentially of use for product safety is considerable in some European Union (EU) countries, its usability at EU level is difficult due to high fragmentation of the data sources, the diversity of data collection methods and increasing data protection concerns. To satisfy the policy need for more timely information on consumer product-related incidents, apart from injury data that have been historically collected by the public health sector, a number of 'alternative' data sources were assessed as potential sources of interest. This study explores the opportunities for enhancing the availability of data of consumer product-related injuries, arising from selected existing and 'alternative' data sources, widely present in Europe, such as firefighters' and poison centres' records, mortality statistics, consumer complaints, insurance companies' registers, manufacturers' incident registers and online news sources. These data sources, coupled with the use of IT technologies, such as interlinking by remote data access, could fill in the existing information gap. Strengths and weaknesses of selected data sources, with a view to support a common data platform, are evaluated and presented. Conducting the study relied on the literature review, extensive use of the surveys, interviews, workshops with experts and online data-mining pilot study.