Workplace Injury Risk Research Articles

Patient Safety - Worker Safety: Building a Culture of Safety to Improve Healthcare Worker and Patient Well-Being

Patient safety within the Canadian healthcare system is currently a high national priority, which merits a comprehensive understanding of the underlying causes of adverse events. Not least among these is worker health and safety, which is linked to patient outcomes. Healthcare workers have a high risk of workplace injuries and more mental health problems than most other occupational groups. Many healthcare professionals feel fatigued, stressed, in pain, or at risk of illness or injury-factors they feel impede their ability to provide consistent quality care. With this background, the Occupational Health and Safety Agency for Healthcare (OHSAH) in British Columbia, jointly governed by healthcare unions and healthcare employers, launched several major initiatives to improve the healthcare workplace. These included the promotion of safe patient handling, adaptive clothing, scheduled toileting, stroke management training, measures to improve management of aggressive behaviour and, of course, infection control-all intended to improve the safety of workers, but also to improve patient safety and quality of care. Other projects also explicitly promoting physical and mental health at work, as well as patient safety are also underway. Results of the projects are at various stages of completion, but ample evidence has already been obtained to indicate that looking after the well-being of healthcare workers results in safer and better quality patient care. While more research is needed, our work to date suggests that a comprehensive systems approach to promoting a climate of safety, which includes taking into account workplace organizational factors and physical and psychological hazards for workers, is the best way to improve the healthcare workplace and thereby patient safety.

Estimates of Lifetime Risk of Occupational Fatal Injury from Age-Specific Rates

The lifetime risk of fatal workplace injury is a critical issue in the evaluation of occupational hazards. Recently, Fosbroke, Kisner, and Myers (1997) described a metric for working lifetime risk (WLTR) to determine the probability that a worker will die due to a work-related fatal injury in a year over a certain number of years of employment. This quantity was defined assuming that the annual rate of fatal injuries will be the same each year during employment. Recognizing the fact that annual fatal injury rates differ with the age of the worker along with other factors, modification of the definition of working lifetime risk is derived. We obtain the estimates of the lifetime risk using age-categorized annual fatality rates and derive an estimate of the standard error of the WLTR estimator and a confidence interval for the WLTR. We illustrate these calculations by estimating the lifetime risk for work-related fatal injuries for workers in four high risk industries: agriculture-forestry-fishing, mining, construction, and transportation public utilities. The estimates are based on employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and an updated version of fatality data from the National Traumatic Occupational Fatalities surveillance system.

Mechanization, the Labor Process, and Injury Risks in the Canadian Meat Packing Industry

During the 1980s, Canada's major manufacturing industries experienced considerable financial restructuring and technological transformation, largely in response to recessionary pressures. At the same time, the rate of lost-time injuries in Canadian manufacturing rose steadily. This article explores the relationship between these sets of factors. The meat packing industry has been selected as a case study of the interaction between industrial organization, the labor process, and the risk of workplace injuries. The authors suggest that the following factors have contributed to high and rising injury rates in the meat industry during the 1980s: consolidation into a smaller number of large, highly specialized, and mechanized plants; deteriorating labor relations in the face of falling profits; and an intensified labor process stressing line speedups and a growing risk of repetitive strain injuries. These observations are supported by a detailed analysis of the relationship between the labor process and workplace injuries at one packing plant considered typical for the industry.