At least some of us, if not many of us, have come across a worker who was stricken by a permanent disability that made him or her become a former worker.
Even if the job market is tough nowadays, there are many of us who might not have a job but are willing and able to have a job and really want to work.
Then there are those who were capable, willing, wanted and were working until something happened to them physically, emotionally or mentally that suddenly turned them into ex-workers through no fault or choice of their own. And some of us may know these people, and known them when they were able-bodied workers and we see them dealing (or not dealing) with this permanent disability.
[Image courtesy of Flickr user gniliep via a Creative Commons license]While wheelchairs can be a fun resting place for cats, they can be serious life-changing vehicles for many workers who suffer permanent injury or disability at work. Research is beginning to show that the more permanent a disability is, the more likely a worker may die prematurely.
The study, conducted by scientists at the Institute of Work and Health (IWH) in Toronto covered a 20-year span and looked at death rates of 19,000 people who had suffered permanent disability in accidents reported between January 1986 through the end of 1994. The mortality rates were compared with the overall death rates of those individuals who had not suffered permanent disabilities.
In the initial findings, the scientiss discovered that the death rate among the permanently disabled was more than 50 percent higher than the non-disabled workers, with men recording a 56-percent higher death rate and women a 50-percent higher rate than non-disabled counterparts. Before this gets dismissed as just massaging of numbers, consider some of the points brought up in the article, which I will address here in brief.
Getting into the Weeds
There are some interesting details within this study that seems to further back up the over-arching findings. There is a distinction between having permanent injury and permanent disability, and this is broken down further to determine links between ability to work and mortality rates. For men, those who were able to make at least 75 percent of their pre-injury income after suffering the permanent injury we actually 38 percent less likely to die than those men with a high disability (meaning that their post-injury income was 25 percent or less of what they made before the disability). On the women’s side, low-disability women had a 25-percent smaller death rate than those who were nearly or totally unable to work after suffering an injury.
Another interesting tidbit was that the death rates comparison between the injuried workers and the control group of healthy and able workers actually got more lopsided after more than 10 years had passed since the injury. For men, the biggest difference in death rates came 15 years after an injury, while for women that starkest gap was after 13 years.
Flawed Science?
While the study is compelling on some levels, there are some professionals who question the efficacy of the study in a couple of ways. While no one seems to exactly question the idea of a permanent disability leading to a premature death, a couple of scientist want to see more detailed research to recognize the various injuries and disabilities on the one hand and the cause of premature death on the other hand. The fact that there seems to be no data on either end of this spectrum, but the research seems to take a 30,000-foot view, means that there may not be enough here to have safety professionals and bureaucrats huddle up and come up with some new rules.
There seems to be a push for more specific research. This study is on the right track, but without an actual correlation between the types of injuries and the causes of death, it would be difficult to really act on anything. The best we can say here is that there is at least something here to suggest that the importance of avoiding workplace injuries is important not just in the short-term, but also for the long-term health and viability of workers in general.
For the next post, I will delve a little more into this article and discuss a case study about permanent disability, and look into the negative dominoes that can get going once a major injury occurs to a worker. It might be a good wake-up call for all of us to review how we see incidents and injuries on the job, and especially the post-mortem.