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Does the year‐end decline in injury risk reflect reporting error?
Author(s) -
Pierce Brooks
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
american journal of industrial medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.7
H-Index - 104
eISSN - 1097-0274
pISSN - 0271-3586
DOI - 10.1002/ajim.22440
Subject(s) - medicine , occupational injury , incidence (geometry) , confusion , occupational safety and health , injury prevention , seasonality , demography , environmental health , poison control , pathology , statistics , psychoanalysis , optics , psychology , physics , mathematics , sociology
Background Relatively little is known about seasonal patterns in occupational injury risk. Injury risk may vary seasonally due to weather‐related factors or changing work exposure. Employer confusion about recordkeeping rules and injury occurrence near year end may also lead to an undercount of year‐end injuries. Methods Case records from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses and Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries were used to determine seasonality for a variety of injury types. Results Reported injury rates were higher in summer and lower at year end. Difficult‐to‐identify injuries showed greater year‐end incidence declines. Conclusions End‐of‐year injury declines may have reflected reporting errors for some injury types. The summertime increase in injury risk was broad‐based and presumably reflected real seasonal factors. Am. J. Ind. Med. 58:519–527, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.