254 Improving road traffic injury surveillance in Chattogram, Bangladesh

Background Evidence-based road safety interventions require robust local data. In Bangladesh, road traffic injuries (RTI) are severely underreported in police records, and sub-national jurisdictions like the city of Chattogram never had access to disaggregated RTI data. Objective As part of a broader road injury prevention initiative, the RTI surveillance system has been assessed and initiated measures to improve data quality, access, and analysis for stakeholders in Chattogram. The first phase of this work is reported and published. Program Description Baseline assessment showed that stakeholders had limited access to road traffic crash data as documented by police, and no linkage was done with other sources. Coordinated effort has been made with the Chattogram Metropolitan Police to review register books and case records from all road crash cases from 2020 to 2022, extract key variables including, and enter them into an Epi Info database. Local staff completed the analysis and prepared a detailed report of trends, road users, and risks by place and time. Outcomes and Learnings The reported RTI mortality rate was 2.7 per 100,000 population, clearly reflecting serious underreporting as documented at national level. The analysis highlighted vulnerable road user risk, with pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists accounting for 89% of fatalities and trucks identified as the most frequent impacting vehicles in these deaths. The analysis yielded a list of the top 10 high risk locations and high risk corridors which will be used to prioritize interventions. The report was released by the mayor and police commissioner with high media attention, raising the profile of road safety as a priority issue in the city. Given clear evidence of underreporting, a next step will be to conduct review and linkage of hospital RTI case data. Conclusions Digitizing and analyzing local RTI data helped to focus attention on vulnerable road users and high-risk locations, and is a first step towards developing a higher-quality and sustainable surveillance system. Once a new national crash database is developed, this temporary solution can be integrated into that platform, while also highlighting the need for data access and analysis for the local officials who implement road safety policy.