Construction and Results of a Weighted Incidence Index (WIIPA) to Measure Frequency and Severity of Personal Accidents: Europe 2009

Accidents constitute a serious public health problem. To effectively and efficiently address this public health problem, it is necessary to launch adequate intervention programmes. To design such programmes, as well as to evaluate them, it is necessary to establish a thorough and complex apparatus for the statistical measurement of daily accidents.

The study that we present consists in the design, construction and calculation of a synthetic index to measure the annual incidence, weighted by the seriousness of their consequences, of personal accidents in the 28 member countries of the European Union. The index is calculated based on data from several sources: Statistics on causes of death, the different administrative registries that provide data on "hospital discharges" in each country, and micro-data from the first wave and, when available, the second wave, of the European Health Interview Survey(EHIS).

It is necessary to combine statistical sources because none of those currently available provides a complete count of accidents. Thus, fatal accidents are gathered in an annual registry, Statistics on causes of death; data on severe accidents - those that require hospitalisation - come from hospital registries, although they do not provide information on the place of accident, and lastly, the number and location of accidents, although not including fatalities, are from a representative survey carried out every five years, the European Health Interview Survey.

The index of the incidence of accidents is calculated as the sum of the frequency of incidents - deaths, hospitalization, injuries, accidents without victims and/or minor accidents and total accidents - weighted according to their severity. The index results in “death equivalent units” per 100.000 population.

* Project funded by Mapfre Foundation and Spanish Ministry of Economics