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Too much has changed for old data to help today's OHS practitioner

Too much has changed for old data to help today's OHS practitioner Re: Wigglesworth E. Occupational injuries by hour of day and day of week: a 20‐year study. Published in the December 2006 issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health , pages 505–8. I read this paper with some concern. If the paper was purely an analysis of historical data, perhaps as an example of the sort of exercise that occupational health and safety (OHS) practitioners undertook at the time relating to the data, then it is an interesting historical piece. However, Dr Wigglesworth implies in the final paragraph that he sees this analysis as potentially useful for today's OHS practitioner to assist them in improving safety within the workplace. I am surprised that an experienced researcher as Dr Wigglesworth would imply this. There are two specific issues that make this implication very difficult. First, in the 20 years since the last of these data were collected, and certainly since the first data were collected nearly 40 years ago, the Australian workplace and worker have undergone quite dramatic changes. The important ones with some relevance to injury causation include changes to industry type, OHS regulation, composition of the workforce, availability of OHS information, industrial relations, unionisation, and type of employment. I am not implying that all these changes work towards a reduction or otherwise of injuries or improvement in safety, only that these are uncontrolled variables in relation to the 1968–88 data that will have an impact on current OHS. Their effect will need to be examined if trying to extrapolate from this set of past data. Second, OHS legislation today requires employers to identify and reduce risk within the workplace to ‘acceptable levels’. There is no indication within the paper that the inherent risk of the job (necessarily covering all jobs in Queensland in the data examined) varied with time of day or day of week. Dr Wigglesworth rightly examines the possibility of fatigue and points out that there would appear to be no intra‐day or intra‐week effect from fatigue (in fact, the opposite is suggested). Perhaps as employees ‘warm up’ to their tasks (both physically and mentally), they are likely to have fewer injuries. However, there is no direct evidence of this. The point is that these data do not provide any direction for today's OHS advisers and operating managers on how to reduce risk in the workplace. The courts have determined employees will make operating mistakes from lack of concentration or other factors, and that employers have to structure the workplace to be safe in spite of such human errors. Moreover, there is a large body of research from the quality movement that has identified that the majority of errors are caused by the work system itself (insufficient training, inadequate supervision, resources, etc), rather than by ‘careless’ workers. Quality processes such as Six‐Sigma are designed specifically to find and correct such system errors. I am not suggesting that Dr Wigglesworth is blaming careless workers, but that inference can be made from the paper and could be seized on by employers seeking to avoid their legislated responsibilities. That would not be helpful from the point of view of furthering OHS research within Australia. There are pitifully few OHS researchers and too little OHS research done in Australia. It seems a pity that a researcher of Dr Wigglesworth's stature is wasting his time on such outdated material. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health Wiley

Too much has changed for old data to help today's OHS practitioner

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References (11)

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company
ISSN
1326-0200
eISSN
1753-6405
DOI
10.1111/j.1753-6405.2007.00041.x
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Re: Wigglesworth E. Occupational injuries by hour of day and day of week: a 20‐year study. Published in the December 2006 issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health , pages 505–8. I read this paper with some concern. If the paper was purely an analysis of historical data, perhaps as an example of the sort of exercise that occupational health and safety (OHS) practitioners undertook at the time relating to the data, then it is an interesting historical piece. However, Dr Wigglesworth implies in the final paragraph that he sees this analysis as potentially useful for today's OHS practitioner to assist them in improving safety within the workplace. I am surprised that an experienced researcher as Dr Wigglesworth would imply this. There are two specific issues that make this implication very difficult. First, in the 20 years since the last of these data were collected, and certainly since the first data were collected nearly 40 years ago, the Australian workplace and worker have undergone quite dramatic changes. The important ones with some relevance to injury causation include changes to industry type, OHS regulation, composition of the workforce, availability of OHS information, industrial relations, unionisation, and type of employment. I am not implying that all these changes work towards a reduction or otherwise of injuries or improvement in safety, only that these are uncontrolled variables in relation to the 1968–88 data that will have an impact on current OHS. Their effect will need to be examined if trying to extrapolate from this set of past data. Second, OHS legislation today requires employers to identify and reduce risk within the workplace to ‘acceptable levels’. There is no indication within the paper that the inherent risk of the job (necessarily covering all jobs in Queensland in the data examined) varied with time of day or day of week. Dr Wigglesworth rightly examines the possibility of fatigue and points out that there would appear to be no intra‐day or intra‐week effect from fatigue (in fact, the opposite is suggested). Perhaps as employees ‘warm up’ to their tasks (both physically and mentally), they are likely to have fewer injuries. However, there is no direct evidence of this. The point is that these data do not provide any direction for today's OHS advisers and operating managers on how to reduce risk in the workplace. The courts have determined employees will make operating mistakes from lack of concentration or other factors, and that employers have to structure the workplace to be safe in spite of such human errors. Moreover, there is a large body of research from the quality movement that has identified that the majority of errors are caused by the work system itself (insufficient training, inadequate supervision, resources, etc), rather than by ‘careless’ workers. Quality processes such as Six‐Sigma are designed specifically to find and correct such system errors. I am not suggesting that Dr Wigglesworth is blaming careless workers, but that inference can be made from the paper and could be seized on by employers seeking to avoid their legislated responsibilities. That would not be helpful from the point of view of furthering OHS research within Australia. There are pitifully few OHS researchers and too little OHS research done in Australia. It seems a pity that a researcher of Dr Wigglesworth's stature is wasting his time on such outdated material.

Journal

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health – Wiley

Published: Apr 1, 2007

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