THE USE OF TURNOVER RATE AS A PASSIVE SURVEILLANCE INDICATOR FOR POTENTIAL LOW-BACK DISORDERS

Passive surveillance techniques which rely only on injury reporting to locate ergonomic problems within a facility may not be sensitive enou gh to identify all jobs that place a worker at risk of low back disord er. The current study examines whether turnover rate data provide usef ul input to a passive surveillance approach. It is hypothesized, that the turnover of employees through individual jobs, when not attributab le to differential pay scales within a facility, is likely to indicate the presence of ergonomic hazards associated with low back cumulative trauma disorders. This study used the database and multiple logistic regression model developed by Marras et al. (1993) to evaluate this hy pothesis. Two data sets were evaluated with the model to determine whe ther jobs with turnover resemble those with a high historical risk of LB-CTD. The first data set contained trunk motion and workplace data f rom jobs in which there had been turnover but there were no incidents of LB-CTD. When comparing these data to truly low risk jobs (no LB-CTD incidents or turnover), the model yielded an odds ratio of 5.2. This moderate odds ratio indicates that many of the jobs with turnover have characteristics similar to those found in high LB-CTD risk jobs. The second data set included jobs with turnover and moderate LB-CTD incide nt rates. The model's resulting odds ratio of 11.0 indicates that jobs with moderate incident rates and turnover are very similar to jobs wi th a high LB-CTD risk. These results suggest that passive surveillance programs would be more sensitive if turnover rates were determined fo r each job within a facility and were used to supplement incident rate data.