A Revamp of the Native CARS ATLAS: (nativecars.org) with updated motor vehicle injury data sources you can use

Meena Patil Biostatistician

The Native CARS ATLAS was created to share the success stories of six Northwest tribes involved in the Native CARS study. The ATLAS has numerous resources, including materials developed and tested by tribes for increasing awareness of child passenger safety issues and strategies to improve child car seat use and child passenger safety among tribal communities. The website has twelve modules with specific content related to child passenger safety. Whether your community is in the early phase of child passenger safety assessment, preparing to collect data, building strategies, or rolling out campaigns, we have tools and resources that can be tailored to your specific needs. For example, module 4 has tools to help you with data collection, including nocontact observations and observational interview options. The survey form can be easily downloaded and used for data collection. Additionally, the companion Excel file for data entry automatically calculates the percentage of children riding in age and size-appropriate restraints and creates tables and charts of your data. You can use your data for project planning, evaluation, and grant submissions.

The Motor Vehicle Injury Data (MVID) Project team has been analyzing various MV injury data sources to support NW tribes in reducing the burden of traffic injuries and fatalities in their communities. Module 3.2 of the Atlas includes different traffic safety and injury-related data resources and some of our analyses and findings. The module contains manuscripts, newsletters, posters, and presentations using crash, hospital, death, and syndromic (emergency department) data. Additionally, we have some tutorials on using MV injury and fatality data sources, such as the CDC Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS).

We show you how to create a map of fatal MV incidents in your communities using FARS, how to produce your motor vehicle fatality chart using CDC WONDER, and how to download fatal and non-fatal motor vehicle injury data using the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS). These tutorials are in PowerPoint format and include step-by-step instructions to create and download data tables or maps. Each data source has unique strengths, and gathered data can depict a comprehensive picture of the MVI burden in your tribe.

The FARS includes all MV traffic fatalities in the US. We evaluated FARS data for the Northwest and determined that the system is 90% complete for American Indian people, which is very high quality. This data system includes person-level factors like demographics, DUI and restraint use, crash-level factors like location and road conditions, and vehicle details.

CDC WONDER has a wide array of public health data, such as birth, death, cancer, and communicable disease, and it’s easy to use. You can query mortality counts and rates for most of the underlying causes of casualties, including motor vehicle injury fatalities.

WISQARS provides fatal and non-fatal MVI-related data, though non-fatal data are not available specific to the American Indian race. A feature that might be useful is injury-related cost estimates for a particular county. For example, you can quickly get costs associated with pedestrian injury in Yakima County, WA, for 2020 that could be used for budget allocation or requesting funding to address pedestrian safety. We highly encourage you to visit the Native CARS ATLAS to explore and utilize the abundant resources available to help your efforts in improving traffic safety features in your tribes.

We are constantly updating the website with new data resources and improving it to make it easily accessible and user-friendly. If you have any comments or suggestions for us, please get in touch with Olivia Whiting (owhiting@npaihb.org).