The Investigating teams are deployed to the scene of an accident, generally within 20 minutes of the accident happening. Specially marked high conspicuity response vehicles are used. The teams operate rotating shifts to cover all days of the week and all hours of the night and day.
All road traffic accidents notified to police during the periods of operation are eligible to be included in the study. This gives a good cross section of accident types which is representative of the UK situation and allows the data collected to be compared to national data.
The accident investigators attending the scene, collect a large amount of information including the circumstances of the accident, the weather, light and road conditions, vehicle damage and vehicle occupant information. Once this has been gathered, the process of collecting the rest of the data is initiated. Data is collected both from hospitals and coroners whilst adhering to strict rules regarding confidentiality and disclosure. In addition to this, questionnaires are sent, where appropriate, to all crash participants in an attempt to obtain data that was not available at the scene.
Other follow-up activities include revisiting scenes if necessary and collecting traffic flow data where required. Once all the data is collected, the incident is reconstructed in an attempt to ascertain a wide range of factors, including the causes of the crash and any injuries. All this data is then assembled to form an anonymous case file on a database which can then be searched to provide detailed analyses.
