WK 6 Discussion
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Textbook.docxTextbook-Occupational Health and Safety for the 21st Century
The Haddon Matrix and Injury Prevention
The Haddon Matrix, developed by William Haddon, is applied widely to the prevention of unintentional injuries and is germane to work-related injuries. This matrix was used originally for categorizing highway safety phenomena, but it is applicable in more general terms to prevention of unintentional injuries. The two-dimensional Haddon Matrix shows factors associated with injuries along the columns of the matrix; the rows provide the time phases of an injury.72,73 Factors associated with injuries are agent, host, and environment (social and physical environment) variables and time (pre-event, event, and post-event phases). The Haddon Matrix is useful for designing strategies for prevention of injuries from motor vehicle crashes by isolating the specific determinants from the triad of host, agent, and environmental factors that operate before, during, and after a crash (TABLE 8.3).74
Here are some examples of how the Haddon Matrix might be applied to the prevention of occupational injuries:
• Transportation and warehousing (intersection in the Haddon Matrix of the host characteristic, age, with post-event). Recall that transportation and warehousing is the occupational category with the largest percentage of fatal and nonfatal injuries. Transportation injuries include motor vehicle crashes. A host characteristic associated with vehicle crashes is being older than 65 years of age; a preventive intervention to reduce crashes might be to provide testing and driver safety programs for older drivers.
TABLE 8.3 Haddon Matrix Applied to Motor Vehicle Injuries
Reprinted from Sleet DA, Dahlberg LL, Basavaraju SV, et al. Injury prevention, violence prevention, and trauma care: building the scientific base. MMWR. 2011;60:80.
Truck drivers are another group at risk of vehicle crashes. Prevention of crashes might be accomplished by restricting the total number of hours driven each day and requiring rest breaks to reduce driver fatigue.
• Injuries from falling (intersection in the Haddon Matrix of environment with event). In this case, an entry in the cell might be safety rails on construction sites (not shown in Table 8.3). A preventive measure would be to ensure that safety rails are in place on top of buildings before allowing access to workers. Additional measures would be the use of safety harnesses and installation of secure scaffolding and secure and well-positioned ladders.
SUMMARY
Although the frequency of occupational injuries (work-related injuries) has shown a declining trend since the 1990s, work-related unintentional injuries continue to be significant causes of morbidity and mortality among U.S. workers. This chapter defined terms used in the context of work-associated injuries—for example, occupational injury, unintentional versus intentional injuries, traumatic injuries, cumulative trauma disorders, and occupational injury epidemiology.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is a valuable resource for information regarding fatal and nonfatal occupational injuries. However, the full scope of such injuries is unknown because they tend to be underreported. Occupational injuries follow characteristic patterns according to descriptive epidemiologic variables. Falls and musculoskeletal disorders were two especially prevalent forms of occupational disorders. Musculoskeletal disorders include repetitive motion disorders such as rotator cuff tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome.
Some occupations have especially high risks for injuries and risk factors for work-related injuries. Workplace violence is also a concern. Public health and epidemiologic approaches can be applied to injury prevention, including use of the Haddon Matrix.
