We endeavor to use the information from accidents that have occurred to develop measures that will prevent future injuries and reduce the consequences of injuries. Therefore, all information related to the accident is important to us. This applies in particular to the following areas:

• How the accident occurred
  • intentions of those involved,
  • Mental stress from the day,
  • visual restrictions
  • etc.
    
• Equipping vehicles with safety devices and their use
  • Seat belts,
  • airbags,
  • driver assistance systems
  • etc.
    
• Injuries
  • Part of the body affected,
  • Type of injury,
  • extent of the injury
  • etc.
    
• Origin of injury
  • Points of contact,
  • sitting positions
  • etc
    .

We can obtain a lot of valuable information from the vehicle documents and your driver's license. We therefore usually ask you whether we may photograph these documents or whether you would send us copies of them.

All accidents are reconstructed in order to be able to objectively assess the cause of the accident and the mechanical load. For the reconstruction, it is important to know as precisely as possible where the accident happened, how the parties involved in the accident were positioned in relation to each other, where the final positions were and what driving maneuvers they used to enter the accident situation (e.g. accelerating, braking, steering, etc.).

Our team collects a lot of information on site. We also receive information, such as your contact details, from the police in accordance with the Lower Saxony Data Protection Act. Unfortunately, however, information that we can only obtain from you personally is often still important. If it was not possible to interview you on site or if important information is still missing after you have been interviewed, we will contact you in writing and ask you to answer questions and send us additional documents. We are also interested in photos, sketches, medical findings, witness statements and accident reports.

We would be grateful if you could send us these documents for purely scientific purposes.

Furthermore, some time after the accident, we will carry out a further survey with the aim of recording the long-term consequences of road accidents.

We assure you that the information we receive from you will be used exclusively for scientific purposes and will not be passed on to third parties.

Due to ever new possibilities for data processing and revelations of data misuse, the legal requirements regarding the protection of personal data are regularly updated. We constantly check ourselves whether our data processing complies with the current legal and moral requirements for protecting the data of those involved in accidents. We also have this checked regularly by the data protection officer responsible for us.

Among other things, the accident survey collects personal data that is processed in accordance with Data Protection regulations.

The names and addresses of persons involved are required in the course of accident processing and are completely deleted once the case has been processed. Names, addresses etc. are not passed on to third parties. No personal names, dates of birth, license plates or similar are stored in the accident database and it is not possible to draw conclusions about specific persons due to anonymization. Of course, no accident-specific information is made available to the police, insurance companies or the parties involved in the accident.

License plates, faces and other features that allow conclusions to be drawn about the persons involved in the accident are made unrecognizable in photos. Names, dates of birth etc. are blacked out in documents.

Doctors can usually describe injuries suffered better than those involved in the accident. They also have objective findings at their disposal. We are therefore very interested in questioning the physicians of those involved in the accident about the injuries suffered, inspecting physicians' letters and obtaining copies of the objective findings (x-rays etc.).

However, in order to protect personal rights, medical confidentiality prohibits the physician or his staff from passing on such information unless the patient has given his consent in a comprehensible manner after being informed.

We take medical confidentiality very seriously. However, as we would like to have access to the information from the Clinical Departments and the physicians, we ask those involved in the accident to release the physicians from their duty of confidentiality towards us in relation to the accident. This release is voluntary, there is no obligation to release the physicians and there is no disadvantage to anyone involved in the accident if the release is not given.

If you have consented to the release of medical confidentiality, we will only request the data directly relevant to the accident. Of course, this information will also be anonymized as quickly as possible so that no personal reference is possible and no personal data is disclosed to others.

Has our research team documented your traffic accident? We are happy to provide you with information on this, provided it is not protected by the personal rights of third parties. We therefore ask for your understanding that we may only provide you with general information about the accident site (e.g. overview images) and about you and your vehicle. In this way, we also protect your data from access by third parties. Furthermore, for data protection reasons, we can only release anonymized photos (i.e. photos in which license plates, faces, etc. have been made unrecognizable). We normally only carry out the anonymization once all the information we need has been removed from the photos. If necessary, we can bring forward individual files, but we are not in a position to react immediately. Particularly urgent requests incur additional costs for us, which we have to charge to the person responsible.

If necessary, please contact us in writing. You can either use the e-mail address unfallforschung@mh-hannover.de or our postal address (Hannover Medical School, OE 6209, Carl-Neuberg-Straße 1, 30625 Hannover). The written form is required so that we can verify that we are sending the photos to authorized persons. For this reason, we also require lawyers to submit a power of attorney and experts to submit an order before we provide information.