text: j230656-10
  The figures in this bulletin were compiled from the "Stats 19" statistical returns made by police forces. These cover all accidents in which a vehicle is involved that occur on roads (including footways) and result in personal injury, if they become known to the police. As noted in section 2.2, there could be many non-fatal injury accidents which are not reported by the public to the police, and are therefore not counted in these statistics because the police can only include in their returns details of the accidents of which they are aware. More information about this is given in Reported Road Casualties Scotland 2009, in the section entitled Comparison of the police 'Stats 19' road casualty figures with some other figures for Scotland. The vehicle(s) involved in the accident need not be moving, and need not be in collision - for example, the returns include accidents involving people alighting from buses. Damage only accidents (i.e. accidents which do not involve personal injury) are not included in these statistics. Transport Scotland are looking at alternative data sources to estimate the levels of under reporting.
  10.2 The definition of "severity" used in the Road Accident statistics
  (b) any of the following injuries (whether or not the person is detained in hospital):fractures, concussion, internal injuries, crushings, severe cuts and lacerations, severe general shock requiring treatment
  (c) any injury causing death 30 or more days after the accident;
  However, it is also possible that some of the changes shown in the statistics of "serious injuries" and "slight injuries" may be due to changes in administrative practices, which may have altered the proportion of accidents which is categorised as "serious". For example, the distinction between "serious" and "slight" injuries could be affected by factors such as changes in hospitals' admission policies. All else being equal, the number of "serious injury" cases would rise, and the number of "slight injury" cases would fall, if it became standard procedure for a hospital to keep in overnight, for precautionary reasons, casualties with a particular type of injury. The increase in the number of "serious" injury accidents in 1994 was partly attributed to a change in the health boards' policies in admitting more child casualties for overnight observation, which in turn changed the classification of many injuries from "slight" to "serious". The number of child casualties recorded as having serious injuries in 1994 was 35 per cent higher than in the previous year. There could also be changes in hospitals' procedures that would reduce the numbers of "serious injury" cases. In addition, there is anecdotal evidence that changes in procedures for assigning severity codes may affect the categorisation of injuries. For example, different severity codes might be assigned by a police officer who was at the scene of an accident and by a clerk who bases the code on a police officer's written description of the accident.
  10.3 Some other definitions
  10.4 Scottish specific casualty reduction
  10.5 The calculation of the "indicative lines" shown in the graphs
  One way of assessing progress towards the targets is to compare actual casualty numbers in each year with an indicative line that starts at the baseline figure in 2006 and falls, by a constant percentage reduction in each subsequent year, to the target for 2010.This is the approach adopted by the GB Road Safety Advisory Panel.The indicative line starts at the baseline figure in 2006 as that is the middle year of the baseline period.Other approaches could have been used: there are many ways of producing lines that indicate how casualty numbers might fall fairly steadily to the targets for 2020.
  The method adopted to produce the indicative target lines shown in Figure 4 involves a constant percentage reduction in each year after 2006 to the 2015 milestone, then a constant percentage reduction between 2015 and 2020.The resulting indicative target lines represent the percentages of the baseline averages which are shown in the table below.They are not straight lines, because of the compounding over the years effect of constant annual percentage reductions (to two decimal places, the falls are: 3.89 per cent p.a. for killed to meet the 2015 milestone and 3.02 between 2015 and 2020. For seriously injured casualties the falls are 6.06 per cent and 4.61 per cent. For child killed 4.67 per cent and 4.37 or seriously injured 7.41 per cent and 6.90.