Slips, trips, and falls (STF) represent a serious hazard to workers and occupants in many industries, homes, and communities. Often, the cause of a STF incident is multifactorial, encompassing human, environmental, and task risk factors. A STF-related disability can greatly diminish the occupational capability and quality of life of individuals in both the workplace and the home. Countering STF...

OBJECTIVE An expert panel was convened to select practical, valid psychosocial measures for use during National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health field investigations. METHODS A taxonomy of psychosocial constructs was developed using existing taxonomies and criteria regarding the malleability, actionability, and validity of constructs. Panel members identified measures for each con...

Europe has always played a key role in the field of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) and can be considered the cradle of Occupational Health. The European policy framework has been set since the establishment of the European Union, but its strength lies in the enactment of the Framework Directive on Occupational Health and Safety (89/391/EC), which has had a strong positive impact on the as...

BACKGROUND Globally, access to occupational health and safety (OHS) by workers has remained at very low levels. The organization and implementation of OHS in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Botswana has remained at suboptimal levels. Inadequacy of human resource capital, training, and education in the field of OHS has had a major negative impact on the improvement of worker access to such s...

The Workers’ Compensation and Rehabilitation Commission (the WCRC) supports the concept of establishing consistency in the definition of terms such as “employer”, “employee”, ”workplace” and “work-related injury/illness and fatalities” relevant to both workers’ compensation and Occupational Health and Safety (OHS). However, the Productivity Commission should be aware that particularly in relati...

Prevention through Design (PtD) research is central to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's (NIOSH) national PtD initiative. Research is needed to support PtD efforts in all of the other three functional areas (Practice, Policy, and Education) and within all eight industry sectors. The PtD concept is new to many industry sectors. An understanding of how the PtD concept ca...

The aims of the present work were: to calculate lifting energy consumption (LEC) in work activities designed to have a growing lifting index (LI) by means of revised NIOSH lifting equation; to evaluate the relationship between LEC and forces at the L5-S1 joint. The kinematic and kinetic data of 20 workers were recorded during the execution of lifting tasks in three conditions. We computed kinet...