Modelling of road traffic accidents: a multi-state Markov approach

Myriads of statistical techniques have been used to analyze road traffic accident data for causes; consequently serving as a guiding tool for policies made to achieve safer roads. However, relatively little is known about the progression and survival probabilities of road traffic accident victims admitted for treatment in health care institutions. Since the primary goal for safer roads is to save lives, this research work takes this primal one-step further through the analysis of the event history of road accident using the multi-state Markov model. Data of road traffic accident victims in year, 2014 at Akure, Nigeria were collected from both the Federal Road Safety Corps of Nigeria (FRSCN) and State Specialist hospital, Akure. Based on application of multi-state model, it was discovered that progression to injury state is 5 times more likely than death. Also injured victims are 6% more likely to recover from the injury than die. However, the transition probabilities that a victim will dieafter 1, 7 and 14 days of occurrence of the accident were obtained as 0.08, 0.39 and 0.61 respectively. Based on this, it is concluded that more effort should be intensifiedtowards achieving the Decade of action targets of the UN. Also the post-accident treatment of the victims of road accident should be improved as the victims are liable to die, the longer they state in the hospital.