Costs Of Occupational Injuries And Illnesses In 1992

As the debate over health care reform continues, costs have become a critical measure in the many plans and proposals to come before us. Knowing costs is important because it allows comparisons across such disparate health conditions as AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, and cancer. This book presents the results of a major study estimating the large and largely overlooked costs of occupational injury and illness--costs as large as those for cancer and over four times the costs of AIDS. The incidence and mortality of occupational injury and illness were assessed by reviewing data from national surveys and applied an attributable-risk-proportion method. Costs were assessed using the human capital method that decomposes costs into direct categories such as medical costs and insurance administration expenses, as well as indirect categories such as lost earnings and lost fringe benefits. The total is estimated to be $155 billion and is likely to be low as it does not include costs associated with pain and suffering or of home care provided by family members. Invaluable as an aid in the analysis of policy issues, Costs of Occupational Injuryand Illness will serve as a resource and reference for economists, policy analysts, public health researchers, insurance administrators, labor unions and labor lawyers, benefits managers, and environmental scientists, among others. J. Paul Leigh is Professor in the School of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, University of California, Davis. Stephen Markowitz, M.D., is Professor in the Department of Community Health and Social Medicine, City University of New York Medical School. Marianne Fahs is Director of the Health Policy Research Center, Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School University. Philip Landrigan, M.D., is Wise Professor and Chair of the Department of Community Medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York.

Provides guidance for national labour statisticians engaged in or proposing to start the compilation of statistics on occupational injuries through household surveys or establishment surveys.

The national burden imposed by occupational injury and illness encompasses numerous areas of personal and public life: It deeply affects personal well-being, it affects relationships between workers, their families, and their communities, and it affects the institutions and governing bodies of this country. This burden includes a component that is vital to overall function and health at the national, local, and personal level—the economic component of loss. To more completely understand the burden imposed by injury and illness in the workplace, it is necessary to further develop measures of the economic component of loss. This document attempts to add an economic dimension to existing research efforts addressing the incidence and prevalence measures of loss associated with fatal occupational injury. This research effort is of long standing within the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and has been previously reported in such documents as The Cost of Fatal Injuries to Civilian Workers in the United States, 1992–2001, which is based on surveillance conducted within NIOSH and which draws on counts and information from the vital statistic reporting systems across the Nation. The current document builds on this research and incorporates new information and counts from current and revised methods regarding fatal occupational injury, which are described in greater detail within the text of this document. The findings are compelling: Over the period studied, 1992–2002, the costs from these premature deaths exceeded $53 billion, an amount greater than the reportable gross domestic product for some States. These findings inform national efforts to reduce this severe toll on our nation's workers, institutions, communities, and the nation itself. Researchers and concerned parties within the occupational and public health professions, academics, organizations focusing on workplace safety, labor unions, and the business community have all proven to be willing and avid users of this data and have used this research to continue their efforts, in concert with continuing NIOSH research efforts, to reduce the great toll that fatal occupational injuries impose on our workers, workplaces, and nation.

Every year workers' low-back, hand, and arm problems lead to time away from jobs and reduce the nation's economic productivity. The connection of these problems to workplace activities-from carrying boxes to lifting patients to pounding computer keyboards-is the subject of major disagreements among workers, employers, advocacy groups, and researchers. Musculoskeletal Disorders and the Workplace examines the scientific basis for connecting musculoskeletal disorders with the workplace, considering people, job tasks, and work environments. A multidisciplinary panel draws conclusions about the likelihood of causal links and the effectiveness of various intervention strategies. The panel also offers recommendations for what actions can be considered on the basis of current information and for closing information gaps. This book presents the latest information on the prevalence, incidence, and costs of musculoskeletal disorders and identifies factors that influence injury reporting. It reviews the broad scope of evidence: epidemiological studies of physical and psychosocial variables, basic biology, biomechanics, and physical and behavioral responses to stress. Given the magnitude of the problem-approximately 1 million people miss some work each year-and the current trends in workplace practices, this volume will be a must for advocates for workplace health, policy makers, employers, employees, medical professionals, engineers, lawyers, and labor officials.

"Researchers within the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) have a longstanding commitment to determining the circumstances and costs of fatal occupational injury, reflecting the national commitment to understanding the severity and gravity of these incidents. Additional efforts have been undertaken to establish methods and recommendations to reduce the toll on our country's workers. This document continues this commitment to understanding and enumerating the dimensions of this nation's loss from fatal occupational injury. Despite the importance of fatal occupational illness, this document is limited to the economic burden of fatal occupational injuries. Beginning in 1992, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) augmented their injury surveillance efforts with a national, systematic and comprehensive surveillance system to collect information on all fatal occupational injuries in the U.S. The joint State-Federal program, the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), was designed to record, manage, and publish data from reporting systems in all 50 States and the District of Columbia on fatal occupational injuries. NIOSH researchers integrated data from the CFOI program into their continued research efforts, beginning with the initial reporting year, and have published a number of documents related to the NIOSH mission. In addition to reporting prevalence measures of fatal occupational injury, NIOSH researchers also developed measures to capture the economic costs from these incidents. These efforts reflected underlying concerns that the full measure of such loss must include the economic component of this loss. Such a measure not only captures an important additional component of the loss experience for the worker, employer, and encompassing social structure, but may also serves to direct limited resources toward the most effective prevention strategies. The cost-of-illness method, which sums direct and indirect lifetime costs, was used to calculate the mean, median, and total societal costs for the fatal occupational injuries reported through the CFOI program. Indirect costs are calculated for each incident by accounting for median annual compensation at the time of death, the probability of survival, household production, wage growth rate adjustments, and the real discount rate. These costs are then added to the direct lifetime cost of medical expenses to arrive at the societal cost of fatal injury. The addition of the value of household production costs to this model represents advancement in methodology over previous models, which simply accounts for loss of income from wages and presents a point of departure from previous studies. In summary, the current document provides detailed information on the extent of economic loss for premature occupational fatality for the years 1992 through 2002. These estimates are based on a well-known methodology in the field of direct and indirect cost estimation that was adapted by NIOSH [Rice 1965; Rice 1966; Miller et al.1995; Rice et al.1989; Leigh et al. 2000; Finkelstein et al. 2006]. The method is grounded in economic theory and has been reviewed by experts in the fields of economic costing and surveillance systems. Detailed information within this document includes the number of fatal occupational injuries and their total, mean, and median societal costs for each State and by worker and case characteristics" - NIOSHTIC-2

Mirroring a worldwide phenomenon in industrialized nations, the U.S. is experiencing a change in its demographic structure known as population aging. Concern about the aging population tends to focus on the adequacy of Medicare and Social Security, retirement of older Americans, and the need to identify policies, programs, and strategies that address the health and safety needs of older workers. Older workers differ from their younger counterparts in a variety of physical, psychological, and social factors. Evaluating the extent, causes, and effects of these factors and improving the research and data systems necessary to address the health and safety needs of older workers may significantly impact both their ability to remain in the workforce and their well being in retirement. Health and Safety Needs of Older Workers provides an image of what is currently known about the health and safety needs of older workers and the research needed to encourage social polices that guarantee older workers a meaningful share of the nation's work opportunities.