Spatial Clustering of Occupational Injuries in Communities

Abstract

Traumatic occupational injuries were clustered spatially by home location of the affected workers and in a predictable way. This put an inequitable burden on communities and provided evidence for the possible value of community-based interventions for prevention of occupational injuries. Work should be included in health disparities research. Stakeholders should determine whether and how to intervene at the community level to prevent occupational injuries.

Community Resident Perceptions of and Experiences with Precarious Work at the Neighborhood Level: The Greater Lawndale Healthy Work Project

“…Opportunities for work in major cities are significantly influenced by zip code due to systemic racism embedded in historical processes that segregated urban communities in the United States, like Chicago, by race, ethnicity, and income [ 39 , 40 ]. Compounded by power differentials related to social position (at the intersections of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and immigration status), residents in urban neighborhoods that are predominantly Black and Latinx have higher proportions of residents engaged in precarious work [ 41 , 42 ]. Community health and well-being may be impacted in neighborhoods with high proportions of people engaged in precarious work situations compounded by health inequities produced by other social determinants associated with their residential geography.…”

Mortality and Morbidity during Extreme Heat Events and Prevalence of Outdoor Work: An Analysis of Community-Level Data from Los Angeles County, California

“…The results support the notion of work and employment as important social determinants of health and contributors to community-level health inequalities [ 27 , 29 , 55 ]. In the case of extreme heat events, heat-related morbidity may be clustered predictably and geographically based, in part, on prevalence of residents working in outdoor settings [ 30 ]. Replication of this research in other settings, across different time periods, and employing more sensitive measures of industry and occupation would help corroborate the relationship we found between outdoor work and community-level, heat-related health outcomes.…”

“…That is, do communities with greater numbers of residents working in construction, agriculture, and other outdoor settings see higher rates of heat-related illness and death? Such an approach departs from the traditional occupational health focus on workplaces and worker populations, instead highlighting work and employment as important characteristics of communities, in which common work activities and work environments serve as social determinants of health that, in turn, contribute to wider community health disparities [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. Health outcomes related to environmental heat exposure offer a unique opportunity to examine the potential relationship between work and health outcomes measured at the community level, since meteorological data allow for easy identification of heat event days; the symptoms associated with heat exposure are often acute in nature and explicitly attributed to heat in coroners’ reports and hospital records; and population-level data on the categories of occupation and industry are widely available through U.S. Census surveys.…”

Comportamiento de lesiones por accidente de trabajo no mortales y con incapacidad temporal, en personas afiliadas al régimen general de seguridad social en Ecuador

“…Para desarrollar estrategias públicas en seguridad y salud en el trabajo es necesario contar con datos cuantitativos precisos de siniestralidad laboral (Organización Iberoamericana de Seguridad Social [OISS], 2012; OIT, 2019). Un enfoque de gran utilidad para estudiar los accidentes de trabajo es la distribución espacio-temporal mediante indicadores de morbilidad (Forst et al, 2015;Morassaei et al, 2013). Estos análisis permiten identificar áreas geográficas y grupos de población trabajadora en riesgo para determinadas actividades económicas y ocupaciones laborales similares (Hernández et al, 2016;López et al, 2009); tal información es útil para explorar posibles influencias socioculturales y económicas de cada territorio y controlar sesgos de confusión (Guerra y do Monte, 2016).…”