Analysis of Industrial Accidents in Social Welfare Facilities Due to Awkward Movement and Falls:

Abstract

The number of industrial accidents in social welfare facilities in 2019 had increased by 15% from that in 2017. Responding to increasing those numbers in social welfare facilities in recent years, the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare (MHLW) established the 13th occupational safety & health program and has promoted various schemes to prevent industrial accidents in social welfare facilities. Using the reports about industrial accidents occurring in social welfare facilities provided by MHLW, this study investigates the trend of industrial accidents associated with awkward movement and falls. Moreover, this study categorizes the facilities providing similar services into service series uniquely defined and explores the trend of indus-trial accidents in each service series. Based on a sample survey by simple random sampling, this study ex-tracted items characterizing industrial accidents in social welfare facilities, such as age, experience term, working situation, and cause of accidents, from the industrial accident reports in 2019. As a result, this study provided the following perceptions: (1) the occurrence ratio of industrial accidents in social welfare fa-cilities was high among the older and non-expert workers; (2) industrial accidents associated with the awk-ward movement almost consisted of low back injuries and were frequently occurred by transfer tasks of the care recipient with single-person; (3) industrial accidents associated with falls were frequently occurred in which are slipping on wet surface and in tripping on obstacles; and (4) the trend in the type of occurring acci-dents, work situation, cause of accidents, etc. were varied by differing service series.