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A large number of road users involved in road traffic crashes recover from their injuries, but
some of them never recover fully and suffer from some kind of permanent disability. In
addition to loss of life or reduced quality of life, road accidents carry many and diverse
consequences to the survivors such as legal implications, economic burden, job absences,
need of care from a third person, home and vehicle adaptations as well as psychological
consequences.
Although the European Commission has stated that several thousands of
lives could be saved in the EU by improving the response times of the emergency services
and other elements of post- impact care, the attention paid by health policymakers, by the
medical community and by the road safety field to trauma-related care and research has
been disproportionately small so far.
Most importantly, the number of injured in RTCs is under-reported and misclassified in all
countries.The true number of traffic injury survivors in Europe is at least twice the
number stated in official statistics. Misreporting and underreporting are largely due to the
fact that in most EU countries, the national road traffic injury databases are only based on
police reports.
However, the police are not alerted to every traffic accident and the police
cannot be expected to perform a medical assessment; their diagnosis is only a rough on-thespot
estimate.
In light of the aforementioned circumstances, the attention has been refocused on the
plight of victims of road crashes while action has been urged in conducting more national
studies on road crashes as well as in addressing the problems of under-reporting and
misclassification of injuries through improvements in injury recording at hospitals and other
medical institutions.
The current empirical work produces up-to-date evidence on the profile of injured, by using
common and widely recommended classification and measurements for injury severity. The
study involves countries of Southern and Western Europe, where the prevalence of injuries
is above the EU average and the costs for national health budgets are very high such as in
Italy and Germany.