The paper outlines the nature and severity of the injuries suffered by pedestrians in motor vehicle accidents in England. Pedestrian admissions to hospitals in England as recorded in the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) over a nine year period were compared with accidents recorded in Great Britain’s national road casualties database (STATS19). Alongside this, the most frequently injured regions and individual injuries of the pedestrians were investigated. The relationship between individual injuries and the length of time spent at hospital was investigated. The changes in frequency of individual injuries were investigated to see whether recent changes in vehicle design could have altered the types of injuries received by pedestrian casualties.

The HES data from April 1998 to March 2007 in England contained details of 82,811 pedestrian admissions following accidents involving motor vehicles. In the same time period there were 65,526 killed or seriously injured pedestrians recorded in the STATS19 database. It was found that over the nine year period, the number of pedestrian casualties in HES remained relatively constant, while the number in STATS19 has reduced. In this period, HES data shows that tibia and femur fractures have reduced slightly. This could be due to a number of factors including improved vehicle design.

The nature of the HES data means that very little information is included about the characteristics of the accident, which prevents possible causes of pedestrian injuries to be studied using the HES dataset by itself. However, this paper shows the potential of hospital data as an important tool in accident research, as the injury information can give evidence of the effects of the changing vehicle fleet, along with other road safety interventions. Further, through an in-depth understanding of the frequency and consequences of different injuries, future injury prevention strategies can be prioritised.