Occhealth Bulletin
25 January 2010
Characterizing injuries sustained by Emergency Responders
Category: Reviews
Emergency responders (ERs), including firefighters, law enforcement officers and emergency medical services personnel (EMS), face many hazardous situations on a daily basis. They are often exposed to extreme working conditions in response to vehicle accidents, crime scenes, fires, hazardous material incidences and disaster situations. As a result, ERs frequently experience lengthy work hours, stress, assaults, motor vehicle accidents (whilst traveling to an incident), contact with hazardous materials/chemicals, temperature extremes and demands on their musculoskeletal systems. Although ERs are trained to deal with such incidents, they face varying types of exposures and complexity of hazards at each occurrence. Given this variability, it is difficult to measure identifiable hazards readily and characterize their comparative risk. Furthermore, the size of the ER workforce is hard to estimate due to, in some cases, incomplete employment records, workers being cross-trained over a number of disciplines, others working cross-state and volunteer workers and secondary job workers not being included in some national statistics surveys. Therefore, there is limited data on nonfatal injury or illness rates, among ERs, offered by national surveillance systems.
A recent study by researchers, Reichard and Jackson, from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) aimed to address this issue. They analyzed data from NIOSH’s 2000-2001 National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS-Work) occupational supplement on a geographically stratified probability sample of 67 US hospitals each with a 24-hour emergency department (ED) to characterize injuries among ERs. From the annual average of 3,984,300 work-related injuries treated in the hospital EDs, 123,900 occurred to ERs (~3% of the total). The researchers found that law enforcement officers suffered 52% of the total injuries endured by ERs, 30% by firefighters and 18% by EMS personnel.
Of the types of injuries to ERs, the most common experienced by the three emergency responder occupations were sprains and strains followed by contusions/abrasions and lacerations. The upper extremities of the body were the most frequently injured parts of the body in the three emergency responder groups studied, followed by the lower extremities for firefighters and law enforcement and neck and back for EMS. In terms of injury rates, the researchers determined that police officers and career firefighters had the highest rates calculated at 8.5 and 7.4 injuries per 100 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers, respectively.
Reichard and Jackson concluded that their analyses “provide nationally representative nonfatal injury baseline data for emergency responders that maybe used to assess injury trends” although they recommend that further research is required to get the full true picture that also includes the voluntary workforce and secondary job data.
REFERENCE Reichard, AA. and Jackson, LL. (2010) Occupational injuries among emergency responders. American Journal of Industrial Medicine. Volume 53. pp1-11.
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