Overview
Construction workers in the United States face hazards that sometimes lead to fatal injuries. In this proceedings paper with David Passmore, V. Borkovskaya, Rose Baker, and Jeong-Ha Yim, we examined which characteristics of an injury and its work setting are associated with a fatal rather than a nonfatal outcome.
The data were person-level records of 2,964 fatal and 1,881 nonfatal injuries from 2015 to 2017, drawn from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics injury reporting and originally assembled for a machine learning competition. We treated them as a case-control study and applied multiple logistic regression, with the nature of the injury, part of body injured, human factors, task familiarity, and the injury event as predictors.
Key points
- Falls and strikes, electrocution, asphyxiation and drowning, and head and neck injuries were positively related to the probability of a fatal injury.
- Fatal injuries were more likely when workers were doing tasks not regularly assigned to them.
- Burns, amputation and crushing, fractures and dislocations, and injuries to hands and other extremities were negatively related to fatality.
- The dataset is not a census or a representative sample, so it cannot be used to estimate injury incidence in the population.
- The results identify risk factors for further study, not causes of death.
Event
XXII International Scientific Conference on Advanced in Civil Engineering: Construction - The Formation of Living Environment 2019 (FORM 2019), Tashkent, Uzbekistan, April 2019.
Citation
Passmore, D., Chae, C., Borkovskaya, V., Baker, R. M., & Yim, J. (2019, April). Severity of U.S. construction worker injuries, 2015-2017. Paper presented at XXII International Scientific Conference on Advanced in Civil Engineering: Construction - The Formation of Living Environment 2019, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/20199706038