218318 Identifying high risk Wholesale and Retail Trade industry subsectors

Sunday, November 7, 2010

HeeKyoung Chun, ScD , APTR-CDC fellow, NIOSH, Cincinnati, OH
Vern Anderson, PhD , Eid, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Cincinnati, OH
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.

Learning Areas:
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Epidemiology
Occupational health and safety
Public health or related public policy
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health

Learning Objectives:
Compare prevention index methods to identify high risk subsectors in the Wholesale and Retail subsectors

Keywords: Injury Prevention, Methodology

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I've analyzed surveillance data on the WRT sector.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.