Background. Housekeeping is an important aspect of safety in the workplace. There have been only a limited number of studies assessing the impact on injury of housekeeping. In addition, measuring the state of housekeeping has posed continuous problems in these studies due to the lack of standardized and objective instrumentation. Objectives. The objectives of the first part of this thesis involved the development and evaluation of an instrument for measuring the state of housekeeping in industry. The second part examined the association between housekeeping and safety. Methods. This study began with the development of a checklist for evaluating housekeeping and proceeded to a fifteen-month prospective cohort study of fifty-seven companies in the transportation equipment and machinery manufacturing sector in Quebec, Canada, each employing between twenty and sixty workers. Companies were followed over 16 months to evaluate housekeeping levels. At the end of the study, information on compensable injuries that occurred during the study period was obtained. Results. Inter-observer reliability of the instrument was reasonably high (ICC 0.88, 95% CI 0.81--0.94) though test-retest reliability was less stable (ICC 0.73, 95% CI 0.68--0.78). In the second part of this study, housekeeping was found to be significantly associated with both injury rates (IRR 1.35, 95% CI 1.08--1.70) and rate of days lost (IRR 1.48, 95% CI 1.39--1.57), and trends were seen across categorical housekeeping levels. The association between cleanliness and safety was not as strong, nor was a trend found. Conclusions. The housekeeping checklist demonstrated high inter-observer reliability. The less stable test-retest reliability is partly due to changes in housekeeping between visits. Obstructions (lack of clutter, clear access to workstations, equipment and exits) and cleanliness components of housekeeping were more difficult, to measure and observers disagreed more when evaluating these components
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.34720 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Dufort, Vincent. |
| Contributors | Infante-Rivard, Claire (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Occupational Health.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001601672, proquestno: NQ44415, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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