You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

XML
Public health
Research
Under reporting of road traffic injuries in the district of Kandy, Sri Lanka
  1. Nithershini Periyasamy1,
  2. Catherine A Lynch2,
  3. Samath D Dharmaratne3,4,
  4. DB Nugegoda5,
  5. Truls Østbye6
  1. 1Postdoctoral Visiting Scholar, Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA
  2. 2Division of Emergency Medicine, Duke School of Medicine, Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA
  3. 3Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
  4. 4Department of Global Health, School of Public Health, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
  5. 5Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Rajarata, Sri Lanka
  6. 6Duke School of Medicine, Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Nithershini Periyasamy; nithershini{at}yahoo.co.in

Abstract

Objectives To conduct a community survey to estimate the degree to which road traffic injuries (RTIs) are under reported and to compare the characteristics of RTI reported to the police to those not reported.

Design A cross-sectional population-based study.

Setting Kandy district, Sri Lanka.

Participants RTIs and deaths during the preceding 12 months were identified through a community-based cross-sectional survey with a sample size of 3080 households. A stratified multistage cluster sampling with population proportion to size was used. ‘Events reported’ to the police were cross checked against events in the police records of the given or adjacent police stations, and either were ‘Events found’ or ‘Not found’. ‘Under reported’ included those ‘Not reported’ and those reported but ‘Not found’ in the police dataset.

Results Information about 11 724 persons were obtained from 3080 households, identifying 149 persons who suffered an RTI. Of these, 57% were ‘Events reported’, and of these 43.6% (n=65) were ‘Events found’ in police records (95% CI, 36.0 to 51.6). There were 42 events ‘Not reported’ to police while an additional 7 were ‘Not found’ in the police records of the given police station. Although they were claimed to have been reported to the police, 33% (95% CI 25.8 to 40.7) were ‘Under reported’. There were significant differences in age (p=0.02), family income (p<0.001), road user type (p=0.001), injury severity (p<0.001) and injury category (p=0.01) between ‘Events found’ in the police records and ‘Under reported’ events.

Conclusions In the Kandy district, 33% of RTIs were ‘under reported’. These findings could be used as evidence for policy planning to prevent RTIs, and highlights the need for a nation-wide community-based survey to determine the true rates of RTI for a better understanding of the reasons for under reporting.

  • ACCIDENT & EMERGENCY MEDICINE
  • Trauma

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2013-003640

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text