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6 .3 Occupational I njuries and D iseases A nalysis
The following methods of the analysis of occupational injuries and
occupational diseases are used:
Statistical;
Technical;
Monographic;
Operational;
Economic;
topographical;
Method of expert estimations.
The most common injury analysis methods that complement each other are
statistical and monographic methods. Today more and more important are economic
and ergonomic methods.
Statistical method (Incident rates)
This method consists of three steps:
1) Collection of information;
2) Information processing;
3) Analysis.
The information is grouped according to certain characteristics:
- gender,
- age,
- profession,
- experience
and is written to a statistical table.
Incident rates are an indication of how many incidents have occurred, or how
severe they were. They are measurements only of past performance or lagging
indicators. Incident rates are also only one of many items that can be used for
measuring performance. There are many items that should be used to measure
performance, most of which are positive in nature; incident rates tend to be viewed as
an indication of something that is wrong with a safety system, rather than what is
positive or right about the system. In spite of this, for many companies, incident rates
remain the primary indicator of safety performance measurement. This is primarily
because incident rates are fairly easy to figure out, and can be easily compared
between one company and another, and are used throughout industry.
The most difficult part about incident rates is that the five major types of rates
are easily confused with one another. The most common rate used is the
“Recordable Incident Rate”. This is commonly called either the “total case incident
rate” or just the “incident rate”.
The “Lost Time Case Rate” (LTC) is the second most commonly used.
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