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California Workers’ Compensation Surveillance



Details

  • Personal Author:
  • Description:
    Background: In California, when an employee's work-related injury leads to time off after the day of injury or medical treatment beyond first aid, the injured worker is eligible for workers' compensation. Data from all workers' compensation claims are required to be reported to an electronic database. Regular and systematic use of this data for public health surveillance requires the ability to calculate rates of injury by age, industry, and other at-risk groups as a way of establishing relative risk, in addition to the magnitude of the problem. However, workers' compensation claims only count the injured workers, and calculating a rate requires combining workers' compensation data with other data. Calculating rates of injury by industry can help increase public health surveillance capacity, identify industry-specific risk factors, and provide early detection of emerging issues. This calculation can improve the use of the data by policy makers, labor and business leaders, and advocacy and community groups in order to direct resources toward injury prevention. Methods: Data from 2015-2017 private sector California workers' compensation claims were matched to the Base Wage File to identify the at-injury employer, and matched to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages to determine the employer's industry code and number of employees by establishment. Establishment-specific data was used to determine industry codes for multi-establishment employers. The American Community Survey was used to adjust counts of workers to full-time equivalents (FTEs) by industry. Rates were calculated by National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) sector, four-digit North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) industry, size of employer, type of injury, and demographic variables. Rates were compared to the Survey of Occupational Injury and Illnesses (SOII) and a "prevention index" was calculated averaging the rank of the number of claims and the rank of the rate of each industry. Results: From 2015-2017, there were 1,972,328 California workers' compensation claims, of which 1,564,940 were private sector workers. Of these claims, 1,386,949 were matched to an employer and included, resulting in a rate of 3.2 claims per 100 FTE. The sectors with the highest rates of injury were transportation, warehousing & utilities; agriculture, forestry, and fishing; and wholesale and retail trade. The highest four-digit NAICS rates were in interurban and rural bus transportation (13.1 per 100 FTE), building material and supplies dealers (11.9 per 100 FTE) and couriers (11.1 per 100 FTE). Rates in these three industries were higher than the SOII rates for each year in the study. The prevention index identified building material and supplies dealers, couriers, traveler accommodation, grocery stores, and scheduled air transportation as industries with high rates of injury and high counts of injured workers. Conclusion: Calculating rates of injury by industry using workers' compensation data increases our understanding of the risk factors for work-related injuries and illness. With additional support these methods of calculating industry-specific rates of workers' compensation claims could be repeated annually, and data could be provided to organizations and individuals involved in work-related injury prevention and occupational safety and health regulation. Incorporating workers' compensation into public health surveillance could lead to preventing work-related injuries in the industries identified. [Description provided by NIOSH]
  • Subjects:
  • Keywords:
  • Series:
    Grant Final Reports
  • Publisher:
    National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
  • Document Type:
    Text
  • Funding:
    Cooperative Agreement
  • Genre:
    Final Cooperative Agreement Report
  • Place as Subject:
  • CIO:
    National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
  • Division:
    OEP - Office of Extramural Programs
  • Topic:
    Workplace Safety & Health
  • Location:
    North America
  • Pages in Document:
    1-73
  • NIOSHTIC Number:
    nn:20067623
  • Citation:
    Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, U60-OH-010895, 2019 Aug; :1-73
  • Email:
    Robert.harrison@ucsf.edu
  • Federal Fiscal Year:
    2019
  • Performing Organization:
    Public Health Institute
  • Peer Reviewed:
    False
  • Start Date:
    20150601
  • Source Full Name:
    National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
  • End Date:
    20180531
  • Collection(s):
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha-512:dff06de047a6e51ae6926fa101ed53e8757aefeec13de7d2035555fea0261ffd978305bfe75d4bc309458ada6398c55882d62594610915176e3e90d0d76a014b
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 1.17 MB ]
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