Road traffic injuries in one local health unit in the Lazio region: results of a surveillance system integrating police and health data.

Objective: Different sources are available for the surveillance of Road Traffic injuries (RTI), but studied individually they present several limits. In this paper we present the results of a surveillance integrating healthcare data with the data gathered by the municipal police in the southeastern area of Rome (630,000 inhabitants) during the year 2003.

Methods: The Municipal police RTI reports, which list the exact location, circumstances and some risk factor of the crash, were searched in the emergency visit, hospitalization and mortality databases, to integrate them with the information on health consequences.