Work-related injuries and attendance at a Canadian regional emergency department.

BACKGROUND

Monitoring trends in the burden of illness and injury attributable to work is key in assessing occupational health hazards; however, New Brunswick does not participate in the Canadian National Ambulatory Care Reporting System which itself does not collect details of occupation and industry.

AIMS: We set out to determine the proportion of emergency department attendances that were attributable to a work-related cause. We also wanted to evaluate the recording of occupation in the electronic health record system, and to describe the characteristics of patients with a work-related presentation.

METHODS

A retrospective observational study over a 1-year period was conducted using an administrative database obtained from Canadian Emergency Department Information System. Descriptive statistics are used to present the analysis of categorical and continuous data.

RESULTS

A total of 49 365 patients were included for analysis. Two per cent of patients presented with a self-reported work-related condition. Health care and social assistance, construction, retail trade and manufacturing were the most common industries reported by patients.

CONCLUSIONS

This study found the rate of work-related medical conditions to be substantially less than expected, and that occupation was not captured for any patients presenting to the emergency department with a work-related condition, despite a field being available in the electronic health record registration system. We were able to analyse the industry sectors for work-related presentations. The recording and coding of occupation and industry would significantly benefit occupational epidemiology in emergency medicine as well as potentially improving patient outcomes and health system efficiencies.