Accident statistics
Welcome to RoSPA's one-stop-shop for accident statistics. Whatever your area of interest, RoSPA's Accident Statistics page can help you to find the information you need.
You may need to know how many children fall out of high chairs, how many people are injured using ladders at work, or any number of other queries relating to accident statistics – and this page will point you in the right direction.
Historical home and leisure accident statistics
Details of home and leisure accidents serious enough to warrant a visit to an accident and emergency department were collected from 1978-2002 at a sample of 16-18 hospitals across the UK. This was to provide an in-depth understanding of how and why home and leisure accidents happened, so interventions could be put in place to help prevent them happening again in the future.
Each record included:
- Details of the person who had the accident, including age and sex
- Details of what happened and where
- The circumstances surrounding the accident (e.g. what was the person doing at the time)
- The injury or injuries caused by the accident
- The involvement of products or other items in the accident
- Outcome (e.g. admission to hospital).
Two linked databases – HASS/LASS (the Home and Leisure Accident Surveillance System) – were created and they came to hold more than 6.8million accident records, and accompanying statistical data including national estimates.
The system was run by the former Department of Trade and Industry (DTI, now BEIS) but funding was withdrawn in 2003. To ensure that existing data continued to be made available, a complete copy of HASS/LASS was given to RoSPA.
Using HASS/LASS, RoSPA’s Infocentre can support researchers interested in home and leisure accidents that happened from the 1970s-2000s by providing:
- Historical statistics (UK national estimates)
- Anonymised summaries of accidents by type, age group, location, type of injury, products/items involved etc.
For more information about accessing the statistics, please email [email protected] or call 0121 248 2063.
Data like HASS/LASS is vital to inform accident prevention. Since 2002, RoSPA has worked for the re-establishment of detailed injury data collection in the UK.
More information about home and leisure safety is available elsewhere on the RoSPA website.
Workplace accident statistics
Annual health and safety statistics are available from the Health and Safety Executive. Data covers work-related injury and ill-health, plus the associated costs.
More information about occupational safety is available elsewhere on the RoSPA website.
Road accident statistics
The Department for Transport has published annual reports on road casualties since 1951. The reports provide in-depth information about the circumstances of road crashes, including when and where they occur, what factors caused them, and who was involved.
Most of the statistics in Reported Road Casualties Great Britain are collected by the police when they attend, or are informed of, a road accident in which someone was injured or killed. However, not all such accidents are reported to the police, and so the data does not include all road accidents or casualties.
Transport Scotland publishes road casualty data for Scotland.
More information about road safety is available elsewhere on the RoSPA website.
Water accident statistics
The National Water Safety Forum developed the Water Incident Database (WAID), which brings together water-related incident data from a wide range of sources across the UK.
More information about water and leisure safety is available elsewhere on the RoSPA website.
Other injury causation databases and information
Additional current sources of online injury data include: