Does Post-Accident Drug Testing Reduce Injuries? Evidence from a Large Retail Chain

A systematic review of the effectiveness of employer-led interventions for drug misuse

“…Based on the review of titles and abstracts, 13 487 papers unrelated to the topic of interest were excluded. The full‐text review was conducted on 152 articles out of which 27 were ultimately included in the review 25‐51 . The list of excluded studies and reasons for exclusion are shown in Appendix .…”

“…Two studies investigated the effect of drug testing on healthcare costs. While Morantz and Mas 41 showed that the adoption of drug testing resulted in a 12% decline in total health claims, Ozminkowski et al 42 did not find a decline in substance abuse‐related expenditure. Both studies had similar study designs and quality assessment scores.…”

“…Nine studies were quasi-experimental studies, of which eight were interrupted time-series analyses, 32,34,37,39,40,42,47,49 and one was historically controlled. 27 In all, 14 studies were observational studies, of which seven were cross-sectional, 26,31,33,41,44,46,50 and seven were cohort studies. 30,35,36,38,45,48,51 The majority of the studies (23/27; 85%) were carried out among employees in the United States.…”

“…30,35,37,38,42,45,50 Five studies investigated the relationship between drug testing and illicit drug use or misuse of prescription drugs, 26,31,33,38,39 while two investigated the association between drug testing with healthcare cost. 41,42 One study examined the association between drug testing and productivity. 46 Two of five studies reported that drug testing was associated with a reduction in drug misuse.…”

Putting Data to Work for Workers: The Role of Information Technology in U.S. Worker Protection Agencies

“…For example, MSHA and BLS could use statistical modeling techniques to examine the distributions of reported injuries across the regulated community and audit establishments that differ significantly from the norm in ways that suggest underreporting. For example, some prior scholarship rests on the assumption that certain types of injuries-especially minor and non-traumatic injuries-are very easy to underreport (Morantz and Mas 2008;Morantz 2013). If this assumption is correct, then one might expect establishments whose reported injuries consist almost exclusively of traumatic and fatal injuries to be more likely culprits than otherwise similar establishments that report a wider range of traumatic, non-traumatic, minor, and fatal injuries.…”