Injury diagnoses within morbidity statistics

An evaluation of the official swedish statistics on seriously injured in road traffic accidents

Only 32 per cent of the category "seriously injured" in road traffic accidents were correctly registered as such in the official road traffic accident statistics. Furthermore, 25 percent were registered, though wrongly, as "slightly injured". Consequently almost one-half of the seriously injured were not registered at all, and they constituted a drop-out which contributes a bias to the statistics obtained. False registration is primarily associated with short-term hospitalization and absence of surgical operations during the hospital stay, i.e. slight injuries, and low age. The material analysed was comprised of 2689 individuals from hospital or road traffic accident statistics covering the Uppsala hospital region during 1966.