From 2003 the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment (SZW) has supported the development of an occupational risk model with the purpose of providing employers with a choice of measure aimed at reducing the risk to employees of suffering injury or death as a result of job-related incidents. The modelling work and supporting software programs were completed in 2008 and this is described in a detailed report (RIVM 2008). As part of the development a comprehensive set of scenarios to cover the full range of occupational accidents was made based on a detailed analysis of around 9,000 occupational accident investigations made by the Dutch Labour Inspectorate. Thirty-six models were built each addressing a particular hazard, like “struck by moving vehicle”. From the accident models logical bowties were built and subsequently surveys carried out to derive exposures of the Dutch population to the hazards. This paper addresses only the accident analysis.
The analysed accident database has a big potential to answer questions about accident causation, and this potential is currently being used by the Dutch Labour Inspectorate to provide input to inspections in specific industry sectors such as construction (Ale et al 2008), for specific issues such as accidents to young workers and for specific activities such as operating a forklift truck. The analyses carried out for this paper were part of a project undertaken together with TU Delft to further exploit the goldmine of information in the dataset.
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