By Dr Phil Martin, Head of Transport Safety, TRL
A world‑first approach to road safety
PRANA is a groundbreaking collaboration between TRL, University Hospital Southampton (UHS), the Wessex NHS Secure Data Environment (SDE) and a wide network of partners across healthcare, academia, government and emergency services. Over two years, PRANA aims to merge multiple transport and healthcare datasets to provide, for the first time, a truly holistic view of the causes and consequences of road traffic collisions in Great Britain.
By bringing together police‑recorded collision data with NHS healthcare data across pre‑hospital, hospital and longer‑term care settings, PRANA enables us to follow what happens from the moment a crash occurs through to long-term patient outcomes. This joined‑up view simply isn’t possible when transport and health data are analysed in isolation, and it offers an unprecedented opportunity to create a joined‑up understanding of road safety risks, and the real‑world impacts of collisions on people, patients and NHS services.
Recognition in the National Road Safety Strategy
I am particularly proud that PRANA has been recognised in the Government’s National Road Safety Strategy for its innovative linking of road collision data with health data.
Referencing PRANA in the strategy reflects growing acknowledgement that reducing the economic burden of road collisions requires closer coordination between the transport and healthcare sectors, and that this must be underpinned by secure, ethical and lawful data linkage.
Although PRANA is currently in its pilot phase, using regional datasets to prove the process and its benefits, I welcome the ambition in the Road Safety Strategy to build on this pilot and explore scaling this to build a national data asset for the UK.
TRL’s role and expertise
TRL brings deep expertise in road safety research, collision analysis and transport data science to the PRANA collaboration. Our team works closely with UHS, the Department for Transport’s Road Safety team and wider project partners to ensure that insights generated through PRANA are grounded in rigorous methodology and robust, real‑world evidence.
Through PRANA, TRL is helping to bridge the gap between transport data and patient outcomes, ensuring that road safety and healthcare policy and interventions are data-led and prioritised to reflect the realities faced by road users and the NHS.
About PRANA
PRANA is creating a national registry, hosted by the Wessex SDE, to collect and link care pathway information on all sick and injured patients. With funding from the Road Safety Trust, the Department for Transport and the Wessex SDE, PRANA is currently in its pilot phase, demonstrating the secure and ethical linking of road safety and healthcare data and is using regional datasets to prove the process and understand its benefits. Outcomes from this early research will support the National Road Safety Strategy’s emphasis on accountability, transparency and public trust in data‑driven research.
Early findings from PRANA
Excitingly the first publication using data from the PRANA registry was recently issued, marking an important early milestone for the programme. In this initial study, the Department for Transport assessed the feasibility of matching STATS19 police collision records with Southwest Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWAST) data within PRANA.
The results demonstrate that it is technically feasible to match police and ambulance records relating to road collisions using a limited set of non-identifiable attributes. The analysis showed that around 70% of road traffic collision casualties recorded in SWAST ambulance data could be matched to STATS19 records, highlighting both the opportunity and the challenge of cross-sector data matching and linkage. Crucially, the findings suggest that police data may potentially understate the true scale of road traffic casualties, with noticeably lower matching rates for pedal cyclists, single-vehicle collisions and non-fatal incidents.
Ambulance records also provide valuable new insight into how accurately injury severity is coded by police, identifying an important area for further research. Next steps will focus on refining the matching methodology, extending the dataset across more years and regions, and working closely with police, local authorities and clinicians. In the longer term, PRANA aims to link with hospital admission and trauma datasets and scale to a national level, creating a fuller and more accurate picture of road traffic casualties across the UK.
Collaboration is key
The partnerships being forged through PRANA are fundamental to our success. The programme is supported by the following outstanding organisations, the UHS Research Leaders Programme, the University of Southampton Clinical Informatics Research Unit (CIRU), Southampton Emerging Therapies and Technologies Centre (SETT), Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance, Dorset Police, Dorset Council, the Dorset Police and Crime Commissioner, and has benefitted from seed funding from the Road Safety Trust, NHS England Data for Research and Development, the Department for Transport, Wessex Secure Data Environment, Wessex Health Partners (WHP), the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), Southampton Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), the NIHR Wessex Experimental Medicine Network and the Wessex Applied Research Collaboration .
Without doubt, this registry is the first important step in creating a national data asset that will save lives and I’m incredibly proud to be part of it. To find out how TRL can help make your road network safer, drop us a line at enquiries@trl.co.uk
