Police casualty returns and hospital admissions capture different parts of road injury. Successive delivery plans and newly published minutes show the work under way to bring fuller evidence into prevention.
A plan to strengthen the health evidence used in Scotland’s road-safety decisions has carried into a second annual delivery programme, with the latest official report still listing recruitment of a specialist analyst as work to be done.
The commitment appeared in the plan published on 22 August 2025, which placed recruitment within its immediate programme for 2025/26. Public Health Scotland was to provide an analyst for the National Safer Systems Observatory, with work priorities agreed with Transport Scotland. Funding for an advanced epidemiologist role was then under evaluation.
The next plan, published on 4 September 2026, reports progress on the arrangements: the agencies had agreed an outline project plan, negotiations had advanced and draft agreements were undergoing Scottish Government legal checks. Recruiting the analyst and beginning the project are listed for 2026/27.
The initiative sits alongside proposals for wider changes to collision records. Minutes published on 19 October, covering an 11 August meeting of the national road-safety Operational Partnership Group, record an action for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents to discuss recommendations from its crash-data research with Transport Scotland officials.
RoSPA’s research, funded by the charity and Transport Scotland, drew on existing evidence and engagement with 16 partner organisations. It found that information held across policing, health, transport and other organisations was not routinely integrated, limiting the picture available to those designing prevention measures.
Two systems, different records
Public Health Scotland recorded 2,458 emergency hospital admissions associated with road-traffic injuries in 2024/25, including 439 involving pedal cyclists. Transport Scotland’s latest published series records 1,978 seriously injured road casualties in calendar year 2024; its detailed 2024 tables record 158 seriously injured cyclists.
Those figures cannot be subtracted to produce a count of people missing from police records. The hospital series covers a financial year and is organised by the year of discharge. It counts admissions, and its notes explicitly warn that one patient can have several emergency admissions within a year. The police figures cover casualties in a calendar year.
The scope also differs. Hospital figures come from administrative records of inpatient admissions in Scotland, identified through the road-traffic injury admission code. Police statistics cover personal-injury collisions involving vehicles on public roads, including footways, that become known to the police. A serious injury in the police system does not necessarily require admission to hospital.
Transport Scotland itself says its police-based statistics are expected to undercount road casualties because non-fatal injury collisions may never be reported. Establishing how the two populations overlap requires work on individual records, definitions and timing; the published totals alone do not provide that answer.
The provisional national figures nevertheless show a substantial reduction in deaths. In 2025, 134 people died and 1,906 were seriously injured in reported road collisions. Deaths fell from 160 in 2024 to the lowest annual total outside the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. Serious injuries fell by four per cent.
Following the evidence beyond the collision
The need to update records as investigations develop has already produced changes to Scotland’s statistics. A review described in the 2024 casualty publication compared the police operational fatality log with records used for official statistics after inconsistencies emerged over winter 2024/25.
Some deaths initially entered as collision fatalities were later identified as resulting from medical episodes or suicide. These should be excluded under the statistical rules. In some cases, the operational log had been updated while the corresponding statistical record had not. Transport Scotland reported additional guidance, checks on completed investigations and a check between police and statisticians before official figures are finalised.
Recording has also changed at the point of collection. Revised national STATS19 reporting fields were implemented on Police Scotland’s collision recording system in November 2023, according to Transport Scotland.
Existing investigations show how more detailed analysis can identify practical action. A Transport Scotland and Police Scotland study published in March 2026 examined collisions resulting in cyclist injuries from January 2020 to November 2024. It identified junctions and roundabouts as significant risks and recommended partnership visits to particular roads and collision locations to examine possible improvements. Its recommendations included checking locations where an appropriate barrier had been identified as a potential countermeasure, subject to further assessment at each site.
RoSPA proposes a shared incident identifier across emergency services, an integrated dataset and a pilot process in which agencies review fatal and life-changing injury collisions together. The report envisages legal safeguards, controlled handling of personal information and review of the resulting recommendations. It also identifies staffing and analytical capacity as constraints on putting fuller evidence to work.
From records to road works
Collision records already influence where engineering work is considered. Transport Scotland’s 2026/27 trunk-road safety plan describes screening for locations with three or more injury collisions within a defined area over three years, and for routes whose injury-collision rates are significantly above those of comparable roads.
There is also a route into investigation where casualty numbers are low. Risk mapping considers road characteristics and the surrounding environment, while police, councils and other partners can raise current concerns. Dangerous locations can therefore be considered before a cluster of recorded injuries develops.
Near misses and damage-only incidents present another gap. The trunk-road plan says they are not used to inform safety interventions because there is no reliable national source and damage-only reports lack the standardised format used for injury collisions. That limits the evidence available for consistent analysis across the network.
Health information could extend the record beyond the roadside to what happened after someone entered hospital. Accurate linkage would help analysts establish whether differences between the datasets reflect repeat admissions, reporting practices or injuries absent from police records.
The September delivery plan also commits Transport Scotland and Police Scotland to further in-depth analysis of fatal collisions from 2021 to 2024, with a report planned during 2026/27.
The August minutes record discussion of RoSPA’s recommendations but no agreed launch date or budget for its proposed combined dataset or case-review pilot. The next Operational Partnership Group meeting is scheduled for 17 November.
Sources
Road Safety Framework to 2030: Annual Progress Report 2025/26 and Delivery Plan 2026/27
Transport Scotland, 4 September 2026.
https://www.transport.gov.scot/publication/road-safety-framework-to-2030-annual-progress-report-202526-and-delivery-plan-202627/
Road Safety Framework to 2030: Annual Progress Report 2024/25 and Delivery Plan 2025/26
Transport Scotland, 22 August 2025.
https://www.transport.gov.scot/media/qkulmngc/road-safety-framework-2030-annual-progress-report-202425-delivery-plan-202526.pdf
Road Safety Framework 2030: Operational Partnership Group meeting minutes, 11 August 2026
Transport Scotland, published 19 October 2026.
https://www.transport.gov.scot/publication/road-safety-framework-2030-operational-partnership-group-11-august-2026-meeting-minutes/
Preventing Future Fatalities by Optimising Road Crash Data
RoSPA, 2026; report version dated August 2026.
https://www.rospa.com/road-safety/road-safety-projects/preventing-future-fatalities-by-optimising-road-crash-data
Unintentional injuries: road-traffic injury emergency admissions, Table 3
Public Health Scotland, 28 October 2025.
https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/35859/ui_table3_rtis_2025-10-28.xlsx
Unintentional injuries: what do we report on?
Public Health Scotland, 28 October 2025.
https://publichealthscotland.scot/healthcare-system/urgent-and-unscheduled-care/unintentional-injuries/overview-of-unintentional-injuries/what-do-we-report-on/
Unintentional injuries: how emergency hospital admissions are coded
Public Health Scotland, page updated 21 October 2026.
https://publichealthscotland.scot/healthcare-system/urgent-and-unscheduled-care/unintentional-injuries/further-information/how-emergency-hospital-admissions-are-coded/
Key Reported Road Casualties Scotland 2025
Transport Scotland, 16 June 2026.
https://www.transport.gov.scot/publication/key-reported-road-casualties-scotland-2025/
Reported Road Casualties Scotland 2024: supporting information and casualty tables
Transport Scotland, 30 October 2025.
https://www.transport.gov.scot/publication/reported-road-casualties-scotland-2024/
Trunk Road Network: Annual Road Safety Plan 2026/27
Transport Scotland, 21 August 2026.
https://www.transport.gov.scot/publication/trunk-road-network-annual-road-safety-plan-202627/
In-Depth Road Fatalities Report: Pedal Cycles, Executive Summary and Recommendations
Transport Scotland and Police Scotland, published 20 March 2026.
https://www.transport.gov.scot/publication/in-depth-road-fatalities-report-pedal-cycles-executive-summary-and-recommendations/
