Commuting crashes in Spanish occupational road traffic injury surveillance: an integrated descriptive analysis, 2020–2024

Abstract

Objectives To describe the relative recorded contribution of commuting crashes to occupational road traffic injuries (ORTIs) in Spain between 2020 and 2024 using recent official surveillance reports, and to summarize available subgroup patterns by age, sex, occupation, and economic activity when comparable information was reported. Methods An integrated descriptive synthesis was conducted using publicly available annual reports published by the Spanish National Institute for Safety and Health at Work (Instituto Nacional de Seguridad y Salud en el Trabajo, INSST). Reports for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 were reviewed in full. Extracted variables included total ORTIs, at-work crashes, commuting crashes, and the proportion of ORTIs among all occupational injuries with sick leave. Secondary variables were extracted when sufficiently comparable across reports, including age group, sex, occupation, economic activity division, contract type, and selected severity-related indicators. A structured extraction matrix was used. The analysis was descriptive, and annual commuting-to-at-work ratios were calculated to summarize the relative recorded burden of commuting crashes compared with at-work crashes. Results ORTIs in Spain increased from 52,248 cases in 2020 to 76,327 in 2024, while their proportion among all occupational injuries with sick leave rose from 10.3% to 11.8%. Commuting crashes accounted for more recorded ORTIs than at-work crashes in every year analyzed, with commuting-to-at-work ratios of 2.24 in 2020, 2.17 in 2021, 2.20 in 2022, 2.40 in 2023, and 2.58 in 2024. Across the available reports, younger workers appeared among the categories with higher recorded incidence for at-work ORTIs, while driving-related occupations, particularly drivers and mobile machinery operators, and postal/courier and transport-related activity divisions were frequently reported among the main at-work ORTI categories. Subgroup findings for commuting ORTIs were less uniformly reported across years and should therefore be interpreted cautiously. Later reports provided more detailed sex-disaggregated information, particularly for commuting crashes. Conclusions Recent official Spanish surveillance reports show that commuting crashes account for a larger recorded share of ORTIs than at-work crashes. These findings support giving commuting more explicit attention in occupational road safety surveillance. However, because the study is based on aggregated annual reports, the results should be interpreted as evidence of burden distribution rather than individual-level risk or causal mechanisms. Future research using individual-level data should examine exposure, transport mode, commuting distance, shift schedules, fatigue, and work-organization factors.