Abstract
Background
In many low-income countries, estimates of road injury burden are
derived from police reports, and may not represent the complete picture
of the burden in these countries. As a result, WHO and the Global Burden
of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors Project often use complex models
to generate country-specific estimates. Although such estimates inform
prevention targets, they may be limited by the incompleteness of the
data and the assumptions used in the models. In this cross-sectional
study, we provide an alternative approach to estimating road traffic
injury burden for Uganda for the year 2016 using data from multiple data
sources (the police, health facilities and mortuaries).
Methods
A digitised data collection tool was used to extract crash and
injury information from files in 32 police stations, 31 health
facilities and 4 mortuaries in Uganda. We estimated crash and injury
burden using weights generated as inverse of the product of the
probabilities of selection of police regions and stations.
Results
We estimated that 25 729 crashes occurred on Ugandan roads in 2016,
involving 59 077 individuals with 7558 fatalities. This is more than
twice the number of fatalities reported by the police for 2016 (3502)
but lower than the estimate from the 2018 Global Status Report (12 036).
Pedestrians accounted for the greatest proportion of the fatalities 2455
(32.5%), followed by motorcyclists 1357 (18%).
Conclusions
Using both police and health sector data gives more robust estimates
for the road traffic burden in Uganda than using either source
alone.
Funder
German
Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Subject
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health