Citation

Newnam S, Xia T, Koppel S, Collie A. Safety Sci. 2019; 112: 189-195.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2018.10.028

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The professional truck driver population is aging in Australia and internationally. However, there is currently a gap in knowledge related to the morbidity of workers in the transport industry. Understanding the health and wellbeing of workers employed in the transport industry should be a priority to ensure the appropriate allocation of resources to prevention and rehabilitation efforts. This study explored the landscape of work-related injury and disease in the Australian transport industry, by measuring injury and illness resulting in time loss in truck drivers by age group. The study used a population based, retrospective cohort study based on claim data collected from the National Dataset for Compensation-based Statistics in Australia. Analysis on a total of 120,742 accepted workers' compensation claims was performed to characterize the distribution of workers' compensation claims by four time periods (2004-2006, 2007-2009, 2010-2012, and 2013-2015), age groups, and jurisdictions. Three key findings were identified: the relative risk of workers' compensation claims increased with age; older truck drivers (i.e., 65 years and over) did not have significantly higher rates of musculoskeletal injury (MSK) or fracture injuries, and; older truck drivers had a significantly larger proportion of neurological injury compared to younger age groups. The findings of this research support the need for context sensitive, multi-domain, interventions targeted at older truck drivers in order to both prevent work-related injury and disease and reduce the burden of disability once an injury or disease has occurred.

Language: en