RISK-FACTORS FOR INJURY AMONG CONSTRUCTION WORKERS AT DENVER-INTERNATIONAL-AIRPORT

Background The Denver International Airport construction project provi ded a rare opportunity to identify risk factors for injury an a large construction project for which 769 contractors were hired to complete 2,843 construction contracts. Workers' compensation claims and payroll data for individual contracts were recorded in an administrative data base developed by the project's Owner-Controlled Insurance Program. Me thods From claims and payroll data linked with employee demographic in formation, we calculated injury rates per 200,000 person-hours by cont ract and over contract characteristics of interest. We used Poisson re gression models to examine contract-specific risk factors in relation to total injuries, lost-work-time (LWT) and non-LWT injuries. We inclu ded contract-specific expected loss rates (ELRs) in the model to contr ol for prevailing risk of work and used logistic regression methods to determine the association between LWT and non-LWT injuries on contrac ts Results Injury rates were highest during the first year of construc tion at the beginning of contracts, and among older workers Risk for t otal and non-LWT injuries was elevated for building construction contr acts, contracts for special trades companies (SIC 17), contracts with payrolls over $1 million, and those with overtime payrolls greater tha n 20%. Risk for LWT injuries only was increased for site development c ontracts and contracts starting in the first year of construction. Con tracts experiencing one or more minor injuries, were four times as lik ely to hav e at least one major injury (OR = 4.0, 95% CI (2.9, 5.5)). Conclusions Enhancement of DIA's safety infrastructure during the seco nd year of construction appears to hcn e been effective in reducing se rious (LWT) injuries. The absence of correlation between injury rates among contracts belonging to the same company suggests that targeting of safety resources at the level of the contract may be an effective a pproach to injury prevention Interventions focused on high-risk contra cts including those with considerable overtime work contracts held by special trades contractors (SIC 17), and contracts belonging to small and mid-sized companies, and on high-risk workers, such as those new t o a construction site or new to a contract may reduce injury burden on large construction sites. The joint occurrence of minor and major inj uries on a contract level suggests that surveillance of minor injuries may be useful in identifying opportunities for prevention of major in juries. (C) 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.