Linkage of police and hospital data on road crashes

Copyright © 2008 The AuthorsI was greatly interested to read the report by Lujic et al1 of what has been found in New South Wales recently when linking police road crash data with hospital in-patient data, in order to create a dataset with information about injury as well as all the usual variables. The comments by Lujic et al. are worth making, and the numerical results throw light on limitations with the police data. Are the authors able to say why 15% of (hospital-admitted) fatalities were not linked?T. P. Hutchinso