The difficulties of investigating motor vehicle traffic accident mortality in a district

Many difficulties were experienced in obtaining and using data required to test a series of proposed hypotheses to explain the high standardised mortality ratio (SMR) for motor vehicle traffic accidents (MVTAs) in the Bath District. The authors had expected that, given the importance of MVTAs and the amount of effort put into collecting data by established organisations, it should have been possible to access easily the information required to investigate a district which had a high SMR. The variety of data, collected by the many organisations involved in the problem of road traffic accidents, was expected to assist the investigation. However, in practice the result of the difficulties was that the considerable data collected on MVTAs were not readily usable in the district-based investigation described in this paper. Organisational and definitional reasons are identified to explain the observed difficulties. Several possible solutions are proposed. The responsibility for MVTA prevention should be with a single named authority which could be either the County Council or the District Health Authority. Systems should be organised to allow each district to access easily the statistics relating to accidents involving residents of the district, especially those occurring outside the district of residence. Results of coroners' investigations should also be routinely transferred to the coroner of the district of residence so that information on deaths to all residents of a district can be obtained from a single local source. Given the existing systems and limited resources, the authors concluded that further investigation into the high SMR for MVTAs in the Bath Health District was not justified.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)