Identifying high risk Wholesale and Retail Trade industry subsectors

This paper presents comprehensive data analyses of the health and safety of workers in the Wholesale and Retail Trade sector. In the WRT combined sector, more than two dozen businesses registered high incidence rates of overexertion and overexertion-in-lifting. The goal of this study is to prioritize the high risk WRT industry subsectors, not just by rates but by some methods that might give the researcher a better sense of where to target resources. We reviewed peer-reviewed articles on prevention index and cost of occupational injury and illness and discussed prioritization of intervention strategies. To maximize impact, the prioritization of intervention would likely be based on subsectors with large numbers of employees at risk. Sectors with highest incidence rates may be used to identify subsectors based on severity of the problem. Washington State uses the prevention index which combines the ranking of injury counts plus the rank of incidence rate. Some WRT subsectors have high rates but employ very few people, and others have very few actual cases. It might be good to rank each subsector by size and by rate, and then take the average rank score as a method for determining the effective intervention.