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Developing NSW Aboriginal Road Safety Plan through Improved Evidence

Learn how evidence on Aboriginal road trauma shapes the NSW Aboriginal Road Safety Action Plan. Find out about major initiatives and research findings influencing policy development in collaboration with government agencies and Aboriginal communities.

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Developing NSW Aboriginal Road Safety Plan through Improved Evidence

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  1. Use of Improved Evidence on Aboriginal Road Trauma to Develop and Deliver the NSW Aboriginal Road Safety Action Plan Andy Graham and Liem NgoAustralasian College of Road Safety Conference14-16 October 2015

  2. Evidence to Develop Action Plan

  3. NSW Aboriginal Road Safety Action Plan Released in 2014 First NSW Aboriginal road safety strategy Major Initiatives • Funding to make roads in and around Aboriginal communities safer • Up to 1,000 places in the Safer Drivers Course for disadvantaged learner drivers • Create a licensing access services panel for disadvantaged communities • Continue Bike Safety Program with over 3000 helmets already distributed to Aboriginal children • Community road safety champions • To be delivered in partnership with Roads and Maritime Services and other Government agencies • More robust data on Aboriginal road safety issues

  4. Action Plan Development • Transport (Roads and Maritime Services, Community Transport) • Other NSW Government agencies • Aboriginal Affairs, Police, Justice, Education, Motor Accidents Authority, Premier & Cabinet, State Debt Recovery, Office of Local Government, NSW Health • One-on-one agency consultations plus whole-of-government interagency meetings with representatives responsible for programs working with and for Aboriginal communities • NSW Aboriginal Land Council • RMS licensing • Road trauma - Crashlink / Coronials • Literature search • ABS Census Consultation Research

  5. The three lenses of evidence (Head 2008)

  6. What scientific evidence did we have in 2013? What we had • NSW Coronial Data: Fatalities 2000 – 2009 (preliminary CRS analysis 2010) • Around half of Aboriginal drivers and riders were unlicensed • Aboriginal deaths more likely to passengers or pedestrians than non-Aboriginal deaths • Australian Institute of Health and Welfare - national Indigenous fatalities rates compared to non-Indigenous (2005-06 to 2009-10) found that: • Fatal injury rates were 3.3 times higher for car occupants • Fatal injury rates were 5.2 times higher for pedestrians • Aboriginality licensing data collected since 2009 Limitations of crash and health data in early 2013 • No understanding of nature of impact of serious injuries from road crashes on NSW Aboriginal communities • Suspected under-reporting of Aboriginality in data

  7. Political Evidence Align Action Plan to other Government priorities/programs • OCHRE: NSW Aboriginal Affairs Plan • Principles of collaboration with initiatives being targeted, long-term and sustainable, evidence based and local outcomes • State Debt Recovery Office • Resolve unpaid debt, get people licensed • Motor Accidents Authority • Improve take-up of CTP insurance • Department of Justice • Jointly responsible for improving driver licensing access and reduce impact on judicial system • Department of Education / TAFE • Improving literacy and numeracy skills reduces barrier to getting a drivers licence • Align with Connected Communities schools

  8. Implementation – Practical expertise • Use existing people, resources and networks already in place to help in delivery (e.g. Aboriginal Medical Services, Aboriginal Legal Service, Aboriginal Transport Networks, TfNSW Regional Transport Coordinators, RMS Aboriginal Road Safety Program officers etc.) • Build capacity and guide non-government and industry organisations to implement local community solutions • More longer term and sustainable programs • Work with Aboriginal communities including exploring use of community road safety champions • Use Aboriginal people in general public road safety awareness campaigns not just campaigns targeted at Aboriginal people

  9. Action Plan’s Key Themes Three-year Action Plan contains 31 actions across following themes • Collaborative and Coordinated Action • Stronger Evidence Base • Safer Roads • Safer Vehicles • Safer People • Safe and Legal Driving • Transport Disadvantage • Post-Crash Response and Treatment Action Plan can be found online at: http://roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au/downloads/aboriginal-road-safety-plan.pdf

  10. Improving understanding of Aboriginal serious injury in NSW

  11. Data Linkage Project Acknowledgements • Transport for NSW wishes to thank the following – • NSW Ministry of Health for providing access to information in the NSW Admitted Patient Data Collection, NSW Emergency Department Data Collection and the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages – Death registrations. • Centre for Health Record Linkage for conducting the record linkage. • Aboriginal Health & Medical Research Council for supporting the ongoing data linkage project. • This research forms part of the routine monitoring activity undertaken by Transport for NSW to improve road safety for the community and to make NSW roads the safest in the country. It was approved by the following ethics committees – • Approved by the NSW Population & Health Services Research Ethics Committee on 19th December 2013. • Approved by the Aboriginal Health & Medical Research Council Ethics Committee on 24th January 2014. • Approved by the ACT Health Human Research Ethics Committee on 13th November 2013. 11

  12. Data Linkage Project Overview • CRS Health Linkage Project is an umbrella project to enable us to link external data collections to CrashLink and create a de-identified database to investigate the outcomes of road crashes in NSW. • Needed to be set up as a project & approved by ethics committees as personal identifying data was required to link people from different collections e.g. name, address, date of birth… • Project aims: • Develop a regular data linkage between the CRS crash data and NSW Health records in order to improve the road safety decision making process by providing a more detailed and timely picture of the outcomes of road traffic crashes particularly in relation to injury severity. • Use the collective data to enable measurement of key strategic initiatives and road safety campaign outcomes and provide evidence for both current and future policy and funding programs. • Enable researchers to identify and track trends in emerging and previously unidentified road safety issues.

  13. Data Linkage Project Research Questions •What is the nature and extent of injury crashes and the severity range of injuries caused by road crashes? • What type of injuries are occurring, and what is the severity of these injuries? • What types of crashes are causing serious and lesser injuries? • How are the types of crashes and the severity of injury related? • What are the trends over time on injury crashes and injuries by severity? • What are the emerging trends leading to the injury crashes and injuries? • How are injury crashes and injuries caused by road crashes distributed demographically across the various sectors of the community (such as younger drivers, Aboriginal people, males, people from rural and remote areas, more disadvantaged members of the community)? • How are injury crashes and injuries distributed geographically across the road network? • What are the risk factors for the people, the vehicles and the roads and roadsides involved in crashes resulting in injury? • What factors contribute to severity? • How are injury crashes and injuries affected by human factors to do with the crashes taking place? • How are injury crashes and injuries affected by the characteristics of the vehicles involved? • How are injury crashes and injuries affected by the characteristics of the road and roadside where crashes take place? • How do human factors, vehicle factors and road and roadside factors interact in causing injury crashes and injuries? • To what extent are various programs, initiatives and countermeasures effective in injury crashes and injuries, particularly with regard to serious injury crashes and serious injuries? • Is New South Wales on track to reduce the number of serious injuries caused by road crashes by at least 30% by the end of 2021? 13

  14. Data Linkage Project Aboriginality • Aboriginality is derived from the data variables in the NSW Admitted Patient Data Collection and NSW Emergency Department Data Collection • It is flagged in the health records for any visit, not just road crash related • ‘Ever’ was the preferred option for the road trauma analysis 14

  15. Definitions of injury severity The injury severities derived from the data linkage process are defined as follows: Killed – a person who dies within 30 days from injuries received in a road traffic crash Serious injury • Matched – a person identified in the Police crash report data (casualty or traffic unit controller) who is matched to hospital admission record on the same day or the day after a crash and did not die within 30 days of the crash • Unmatched – a person not matched to a police report who has been identified as having a land transport accident on a public road in their hospital record Moderate injury • Matched – a person identified as a casualty in the Police crash report data who is matched to an emergency department attendance record on the same day or the day after a crash but was not killed or subsequently admitted to hospital • Unmatched – yet to be defined precisely at this stage Minor / Other injury - a person identified as a casualty in the Police crash report data who is not matched to a hospital admission record or an emergency department attendance record For the purposes of this presentation the focus is on fatalities and matched serious injuries only (serious casualties)

  16. Fatality Trends • Over the last 8 years, the number of fatalities of non-Aboriginal people has decreased by 37 per cent from 500 in 2005 to 317 in 2013. However, the number of fatalities of Aboriginal people has doubled from 8 to 16. 16

  17. Serious Injury Trends • The number of Aboriginal people seriously injured on NSW roads has steadily increased since 2007. An increase in the number of non-Aboriginal people seriously injured commenced a year later. 17

  18. Serious Casualty Trends • The number of serious casualties of Aboriginal people has increased over the last three years after a five-year period of relative stability. Since 2010 serious casualties of non-Aboriginal people has also increased but to a lesser extent. 18

  19. Extent of Serious Casualty Road Trauma • The next section of this report is limited to the analysis of killed and matched seriously injured persons over the five-year period from 2009 to 2013 • Over the five-year period from 2009 to 2013 there were 1,924 Aboriginal serious casualties (80 killed and 1,844 seriously injured) • Aboriginal people have been identified in 4.4 per cent of road trauma (killed and seriously injured) • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 2.9 per cent of the NSW population (2011) 19

  20. Age Group • Across NSW the proportion of road trauma among under 15 year olds (serious injuries), 15-24 year olds and 25-39 year olds (fatalities and serious injuries) was higher for Aboriginal people compared to non-Aboriginal people • However, the proportions were lower for 40-59 and 60 plus age groups 20

  21. Age Group – Rates per Population • Serious injuries per head of population are higher for all age groups for Aboriginal people • Fatality rates are also higher for Aboriginal people aged 15 through to 59 years • Overall, Aboriginal people are around 1.6 times more likely to be a road fatality and 1.7 times more likely to be a serious injury (age standardised rates) 21

  22. Crash Location • A higher of proportion of road trauma among Aboriginal people occurred in country NSW than metropolitan areas of NSW • The majority of Aboriginal people killed occurred in country NSW 22

  23. Road User Class • Across NSW the proportion of pedestrians killed and seriously injured and passengers seriously injured were higher for Aboriginal people compared to non-Aboriginal people 23

  24. Crash Type (Road User Movement) • Across urban and rural NSW there were higher proportions of killed and seriously injured Aboriginal people from off-path on straight and pedestrian crashes compared to non-Aboriginal people 24

  25. Summary • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 2.9 per centof the NSW population but are involved in approximately 4.4 per cent of road casualty trauma • Per head of population Aboriginal people are over-represented in serious casualty road trauma compared to non-Aboriginal people • Compared to non-Aboriginal people, the following Aboriginal people were involved in more serious casualty road trauma: • passengers, • pedestrians, • those aged under 40 years - especially 15 to 24 years, • those in crashes outside the Sydney Newcastle Wollongong Conurbation, • those involved in single vehicle off road crashes 25

  26. What’s Next • Data link provides us with a better understanding of nature of road trauma in NSW and the high cost to the community • Opportunities to further link data through other sources • Opportunities to incorporate further analyses of Aboriginal serious injury data into the development of the NSW Aboriginal Road Safety Action Plan • Monitor the data to analyse trends

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