Conformity of Workers' and Occupational Health Physicians' Descriptions of Working Conditions

Abstract

To determine whether workers, describing their own work, and occupational physicians, describing typical workstations, would report the same working conditions, and whether the relationships between health status and working conditions described by these two sources would be similar. An epidemiologic survey was carried out in 1987-88 in 17 poultry slaughterhouses and six canneries in France. The data were collected in two ways: workers described their own working conditions, and occupational physicians described the working conditions at workstations in the same factories. The study included 507 workers who worked at fixed workstations that had been described by the 24 occupational physicians. Health data were obtained from the workers by the physicians during their annual visits. The agreement between workers and physicians in the descriptions of seven working conditions was analyzed. On the whole, the prevalences of exposures to the seven selected working conditions estimated by the two sources were similar. Nevertheless, the observed agreement was not necessarily high. When agreement existed about specific working conditions, the relationships observed between those conditions and workers' health were generally similar for the two sources. This result was stronger for physical health problems than for mental health problems. When both sources agreed that the worker was being exposed to a risk factor, the risk estimation was higher compared with the cases of discordant judgment. This study confirms the usefulness of information provided by experts but also the necessity to interview workers themselves about their working conditions.

Keywords:

• working conditions
• informant bias
• communication
• judgment