Background: The burden of fatal and non-fatal injury for the New Zealand construction industry is larger than most other industrial sectors. Injury preventions efforts for construction have however been hampered because of insufficient, industry-specific, surveillance data that is essential for the effective targeting and evaluation of interventions.
Aim: This thesis aimed to describe and test a feasible framework of Injury Surveillance for the New Zealand construction industry. Accordingly, the specific objectives to accomplish this aim were: To identify an optimal surveillance dataset for New Zealand construction injuries; To assess potential sources of data and collection methods; To describe an ideal study design for undertaking injury surveillance; To implement an operational design based on industry stakeholder input; To undertake and evaluate an injury surveillance trial; and To suggest how a viable surveillance system could be permanently established.
Method: A trial injury surveillance system was developed by identifying known construction injury risk factors from the literature, reviewing the data collection practices of the New Zealand industry and other potential data sources and consulting with industry stakeholders about the most feasible collection methodology. This surveillance framework was then tested by combining national data from routine Government sources and data from 3 construction companies that employed approximately 720 workers between them. National construction injury data was obtained from the Accident Compensation Corporation, the Department of Labour and the Injury Information Manager. The trial Surveillance System was then evaluated in terms of its ability to collect the full range of an optimal dataset, the quality and completeness of information actually collected, the ability to identify and monitor injury priorities for the industry, and the future viability and acceptability of this surveillance design to the industry.
Results: A total of 468 medically treated injuries were recorded by the participating companies, with 15 (3.2%) considered to be Serious Harm injuries as defined by the Health and Safety in Employment Act. The level of data completeness across companies was especially low, with on average 18 out of 34 data fields (53%) completely unrecorded. The data from one company was sufficiently complete (i.e. 63% across all fields) to allow individual risk factor analyses to be conducted, whereas the absence of complete denominator data prevented the completion of the same analyses for the other two companies. Viewed overall, Government agency data was sufficiently detailed to estimate national longitudinal trends, injury agency and mechanism priorities for specific occupations and industry subsectors, and allowed a rudimentary evaluation of a national intervention programme. However, questions about data accuracy, completeness and under-reporting were raised for each of the Government data sources used.
Conclusions: Using data entirely from Government sources appears to be the most immediately viable framework of Injury Surveillance for the New Zealand construction industry. As such, the relevant range of analyses demonstrated by this study should be continued, expanded and improved. In contrast, obtaining injury surveillance data from companies in the manner that was tested does not appear to feasible, given the difficulty in recruiting companies and the poor data completeness of those companies that did participate. However, the increased range of prevention targets identified by the company that did largely contribute data as intended, demonstrated that company surveillance had merit relative to existing procedures. Suggested steps toward implementing viable construction injury surveillance within New Zealand are outlined, including a recommendation to the industry�s Health and Safety organisation, SiteSafe, to investigate the most feasible data collection protocol for its members.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/234765 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | McCracken, Selwyn, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Otago. Dunedin School of Medicine |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://policy01.otago.ac.nz/policies/FMPro?-db=policies.fm&-format=viewpolicy.html&-lay=viewpolicy&-sortfield=Title&Type=Academic&-recid=33025&-find), Copyright Selwyn McCracken |
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