Work-related injuries within a large urban public school system in the Mid-Western United States.
Bingbing Wu, Kendra Varner, Matthew M Dahm and 2 others
PMID 30856143WHAT IT FOUND
No significant overall injury trend change was found for 2014 and 2015.
Slip, trip and fall and combative situations were most common among 598 reported school district injuries, and facility workers had the most severe injury burden.
Key findings
01Employees reported 598 occupational injuries from January 2014 to December 2015, with slip, trip and fall (246 cases) and combative situations (167 cases) as the most common categories.
02Teacher and para-professional job categories accounted for about 54% of reported injuries, and a student striking an employee caused over 70% of combative situation injuries.
03The Severity Index ranked over-exertion and slip, trip and fall as the most severe injury types, and ranked facility workers, especially building engineers and custodians, as having the most severe injury burden.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study relied on self-reported injury records, so unreported events may have been missed. Reporting quality varied because multiple individuals completed the records, and some details were missing. The researchers could not obtain workforce size by job category, so they could not calculate injury rates. The data came from one large urban school district in the Mid-Western United States, so they may not apply to other districts. The study described injury reports and did not test a prevention program or therapy.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the 2015 increases in recordable injuries as evidence that school safety worsened. The study used self-reported injury records from one district, lacked workforce size by job category for rates, and did not test an intervention.