Digest 3. 11-01-2010 aka - Steve on Risk and Worker Illness

[Guest guest]

Steve:

Regarding:

" This crazy process of determining risk in order to set exposure guidelines

through a judicial or political process is why the US will eventually wind

up adopting EU exposure guidelines.

Countries with national health care systems have much better records of

worker illness and a greater interest in saving health care costs borne by

taxpayers. "

Response:

1. The process is not crazy, it is well vetted, is a way of managing

risk in consideration of human factors. It is not perfect by any means and

it is slow; and it could be improved and streamlined.

2. As for the counties with national health care, could you please

provide your data to back up this statement. I look forward to seeing it.

3. I reviewed a few thousand records from the ILO (many thanks to some

wonderful colleagues for their help with guest access to the database

files).

I thought I would take the European Data (which I'd call socialistic in

general, although I recognize national health care is not universal in these

countries) and compile it for 1999-2008.

I had to remove the " Russian Federation " , Turkey, and Ukraine and these

would have skewed things higher [Of course 2 of these have a form of

national healthcare]. I had to recalculate a few to get common units. I

averaged it for all of Europa - the consistency (lack of variability) in the

fatality data is remarkable. I thought about adjusting for work hours on

injuries since some countries work less hours on average and some work more

which at a qualitative look would narrow the rates even more, but I did not.

UK seemed low in its rates across the board. I checked the subsectors and I

suspect that they modified their rates to reflect some non-occ work. But I

left it in as is (low) anyway. Numbers from both sets in the database were

already rounded.

A. Europe:

Non-Fatal Injuries per 100,000 employees

1892

Fatalities per 100,000 employees

4.27

(Spain, Luxemborg, and France were all over 4,000 on non-fatal injuries)

I used the same database for the US (to minimum and conversion bias)

B. US:

Non-Fatal Injuries per 100,000 employees

300 (I suspect the way this was calculated is about 1.5-2X too low)

Fatalities per 100,000 employees

3.97

C. OF if I do go and look at those European countries with some form of

national healthcare:

Non-Fatal Injuries per 100,000 employees

2754

Fatalities per 100,000 employees

4.55

Obviously there are differences in reporting quality, work hours, reporting

requirements, etc. But I don't think you could find a statistical

difference to support your point.

Tony

Ps Canada was 3.22 for Fatalities, 1939 for Non-Fatal Injuries - perhaps

they included hockey injuries (go Pens).

.......................................................................

" Tony " Havics, CHMM, CIH, PE

pH2, LLC

5250 E US 36, Suite 830 Avon

IN 46123

www.ph2llc.com

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90% of Risk Management is knowing where to place the decimal point...any

consultant can give you the other 10%(SM)

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