Organizational and personal factors in occupational traffic injuries at work in Spain

Abstract

Objective

Traffic crashes are one of the major causes of deaths at work. However, most of the literature on traffic crashes did not study the influence of worker and organization conditions. The current paper analyses the influence of the personal and organizational factors associated with the severity of occupational traffic crashes.

Methods

A total of 724,596 occupational traffic crashes that occurred in Spain from 2009 to 2019 were analyzed. Men suffered 59% of crashes registered, while workers younger than 30 represented 31.3% of crashes studied. Variables included in the Official Occupational Accident Report were analyzed using logistic regression calculating odds ratios.

Results

Results showed that a foreign, professional male driver from a small company who is older than 55 years was more likely to suffer a fatal crash. In contrast, a Spanish, nonprofessional female driver from a medium or big company who is younger than 30 years is more likely to suffer light consequences.

Conclusions

Findings from the current research could help to improve the safety training programmes in companies considering their personal and business variables such as age, gender, or company staff, especially in small companies. Future research should collect and analyze additional variables combining different data sources.

Keywords:

• Occupational
• traffic
• crash
• driver
• injury
• severity

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to acknowledge the Spanish Ministry of Labour and Social Economy for the anonymized data supplied for the current research.