Serious road injuries
Local Government Areas (LGA)
Serious injuries involving vehicle crashes in Victoria during high alcohol hours.
Definitions
Alcohol Hours
Alcohol involvement is not directly measured for some datasets, therefore an alternative surrogate measure of applying alcohol hours is used. There are two different sets of hours used, one for serious road injuries, and the other for assaults.
Serious Road Injury:
| Metro areas | High alcohol hours (HAH) | Sunday 6pm – Monday 6am |
| Monday 8pm – Tuesday 6am | ||
| Tuesday 6pm – Wednesday 4am | ||
| Wednesday 6pm – Thursday 6am | ||
| Thursday 6pm – Friday 6am | ||
| Friday or Saturday 4pm – 8am | ||
| Regional areas | High alcohol hours (HAH) | Sunday 6pm – Monday 6am |
| Monday 8pm – Tuesday 4am | ||
| Tuesday 6pm – Wednesday 4am | ||
| Wednesday 6pm – Thursday 4am | ||
| Thursday 6pm – Friday 6am | ||
| Friday 6pm – Saturday 8am | ||
| Saturday 4pm – Sunday 10am |
Methods
Scope
AODstats provides the ability to track trends of acute harms at the community level, and help inform policy and strategies to intervene and minimise the impact or spread of these harms.
This information provides a convenient, interactive, statistical resource for policy planners, drug service providers, health professionals and other key stakeholders, interested in the harms relating to alcohol and other drug use in Victoria.
Data Analysis
For further information on the analysis, please see the methods document (the document opens in a new tab).
- Data indicator: Serious Road Injury
- Data Source: VicRoads CrashStats
- Details of data analysis: Unit level, road crash data from VicRoads is used. Alcohol involvement is not directly measured in most road accidents, apart from fatal crashes. Therefore, a surrogate measure is used and this involves using alcohol hours. Alcohol hours were applied to serious road injury data, using time stamps, to determine alcohol harms. Data is based on location of road crash event.
Metrics presented
- Numbers: cell sizes less than 5 are obfuscated in line with ethics and data custodian requirements. Some other categorical data may also be obfuscated if a category can be calculated by subtracting any remaining categories from the total.
- Rates: rates are crude rates, which can allow for adjustment of population sizes across different areas, however these do not adjust for certain demographic attributes (specifically age and sex). The advantage to using crude rates is particularly important from a policy perspective, to understand what is influencing the rates. For example, it is important for policy and services to be aware if an area has more men and younger people.
- Population estimates: ABS estimated resident population (ERP) on age, sex and statistical local areas is used throughout AODstats based on calendar year of data. For financial year datasets, the earliest year is used (e.g. 2012/13, 2012 ERP is used).
Limitations
There are limitations to using administrative data for purposes other than what it was originally intended when collected. This includes:
- Incomplete or missing data and inadequate coding.
- Location information is dependent upon dataset and the majority of times LGA is the smallest area provided, and sometimes only state based data is available.
- Crude rates are used, which do not allow for certain demographic attributes (age and gender) to be compared accurately across areas, and also rates based on small numbers can produce unstable results.