Book Description

The European Agency for Safety and Health at work (EU-OSHA) aims to estimate the costs of accidents at work, work-related health problems and work-related deaths in Europe. The first step towards achieving this objective entails the production of an overview of the availability and quality of the national and international data sources required for the development of such a European-level cost calculation. The current report presents these results. The availability of relevant data was checked at the international as well as the national level in the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU-28), Iceland and Norway. Data were collected with the assistance of country experts who were asked to complete forms relating to sources of cases and costs of accidents at work and work-related health problems. The resulting data were assessed against predefined quality criteria. The cost assessment was limited to an overview of availability of data. Having assessed the coverage and quality of the available data sources, it became apparent that there were insufficient data to determine cases of the work-related burden of disease at the European level. There is a paucity of robust, reliable data relating to accidents at work and work-related health problems. With regard to costs, we found that direct healthcare costs can be deduced from international data sources. Calculating indirect costs, however, would be challenging, as data relating to several additional costs and the friction period are missing. Based on the available data sources on gross salary, we recommend adopting the human capital approach. An essential prerequisite for the use of such an approach, however, is that the number of missed work days can be estimated. Despite the lack of data, some of the gaps may be filled through estimation. Suggestions for an approach to doing so can be based on the following observations: - In some countries the availability of data sources appears to be reasonably sound and may be sufficient to carry out a cautious estimation. Subsequently, these results may be used to estimate the costs in other countries with comparable structures. - Through a combination of figures on the work-related fraction of diseases, incidence and prevalence of these diseases, and costs associated with such diseases, a cost estimation may be feasible for some specific work-related diseases. - Since much research has been done on the impact of certain risk factors on specific health problems, and figures on the occurrence of certain risk factors are also available, a cost estimation by risk factor seems feasible. An approach like this may allow a partial cost estimation. However, an estimate of the total burden of work-related disease would require a considerable number of assumptions to be made.