Incidence of Road Traffic Injury in Thailand: a Comparison of the Hospital-Based Surveillance System and the Thai National Injury Survey

Abstract

Road traffic injury is the leading cause of injury death and disability in Thailand, with more than half a million people seriously injured and around 5,000 deaths each year. Given the magnitude of the problem, it is important to validate road traffic injury statistics. The Thai Ministry of Public Health established a Provincial Injury Surveillance System (PISS) to collect injury data from hospitals. The system was designed to evaluate the quality of acute trauma care, referral services, and to improve injury prevention and control at the local and the national level since 1995.  The burden and related information obtained from the system has been used as an input to develop the national policy on injury prevention. In 2003, the Thai National Injury Survey (TNIS) conducted a community survey to ascertain the causes and factors contributing to Thailand’s mortality and morbidity patterns. The TNIS involved interviews with more than 100,000 households representing nearly 400,000 residents in 21 provinces, making it the largest community based survey on mortality and morbidity in Thailand. This is the first study to measure the reporting gap for injury statistics on a national level. We compared data from the TNIS to that gathered by the PISS in 2004 and found that the overall TNIS records a rate 5 times higher than the PISS in all five regions (mean injury incidence: 596 per 100,000 vs 129 per 100,000). Most injuries that need medical care are not treated in hospital, and do not count in the national statistics in Thailand.