Occupational Medicine & Health Affairs
Open Access

Research Article

A Comparison Study of Traumatic Occupational Injury Burden by Departments in an Industrial Establishment in South-South Nigeria

Ita Bassey Okokon^1,2*, Owigho Peter Opreh³, Udoezuo Kingsley Ogbonna², Edidiong Elerius John² and Okong Effiom Orok^2,3

¹Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, College of Medical Sciences, University of Calabar, P.M.B. 1115, Calabar, Nigeria

²Department of Family Medicine, University of Calabar Teaching Hospital, P.M.B. 1278, Calabar, Nigeria

³Seventh-Day Adventist Hospital, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria

*Corresponding Author:

Ita B Okokon
Department of Family Medicine
Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
College of Medical Sciences
University of Calabar, Calabar, Nigeria
Tel: +234 803 345 8695
E-mail: itabokokon@yahoo.com

Received date: October 20, 2014; Accepted date:January 20, 2015; Published date: January 26, 2015

Citation: Okokon IB, Opreh OP, Ogbonna UK, John EE, Orok OE (2015)A Comparison Study of Traumatic Occupational Injury Burden by Departments in an Industrial Establishment in South-South Nigeria. Occup Med Health Aff 3:193. doi: 10.4172/2329-6879.1000193

Copyright: © 2015 Sarah OA, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Objective: This study aimed to compare traumatic occupational injury burden by departments in an industrial establishment in the South-South geo-political zone of Nigeria.

Materials and methods: This was a 12-month descriptive longitudinal study of traumatic occupational injuries among workers in all the Departments of a paper-producing company in Nigeria. All workers traumatically injured at work were coded and enlisted into the study with their workers’ identification numbers. Data obtained were analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences for windows version 16.0. Regressional statistics was used to compare categorical variables while descriptive statistics were used to summarize other variables.

Results: The results show that the specific incidence rates for the two departments that were most injury-prone: Mechanical Engineering and Logging Departments were 77.4 traumatic injuries/1000 workers and 214.3 traumatic injuries/1,000 workers, with proportions of 3.8% and 5.7% involvement of the workers in the affected departments respectively, for severe injuries. The burden of injury in Logging department was statistically significant over that in Mechanical Engineering Department for all the traumatically injured (p<0.05).

Conclusion: Regular training of workers on the job regarding safety measures in general is recommended along with the use of ergonomic-oriented enhancements nationally, to forestall the occurrence of avoidable accidents. The opening of a National Occupational Injury Register in Nigeria is also recommended to keep track and stem the occurrences of injuries in workplaces. Currently, the services of Family Physicians in the face of critically few Occupational Health Physicians remain invaluable in industrial settings in the country.

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