Costs and compensation of work-related injuries in British Columbia sawmills

Hasanat Alamgir ^1*, Emile Tompa ², Aleck Ostry ¹, Mieke Koehoorn ¹ and Paul Demers ¹

¹ University of British Columbia, Canada
² Institute for Work and Health, Canada

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: hasanat{at}interchange.ubc.ca.

Accepted 6 October 2006

Abstract

Objective: This study evaluated the costs of work-related injury in a cohort of sawmill workers in British Columbia from the perspective of the workers’ compensation system. Methods: Hospital discharge records were extracted from 1989 to 1998 for a cohort of 5,786 actively employed sawmill workers. A total of 173 work-related injury cases were identified from these records using ICD-9 external cause of injury codes and the responsibility of payment schedule. Workers’ compensation records were extracted and matched with hospital records by dates and ICD-9 diagnosis codes. All costs were converted into 1995 constant Canadian dollars using the provincial general consumer price index for the non-healthcare costs and medical consumer price index for the healthcare costs. A 5% discounting rate was applied to adjust for the time value of money. For the uncompensated cases, costs were imputed from the compensated cases using the median cost for a similar nature of injury. Results: There were 370 injury hospitalization events captured, and by either of the two indicators (E Codes or payment schedules), 173 (47%) injury hospitalizations were identified as work-related. The median health care cost was $4,377 and for no-healthcare cost was $16,559 for a work-related injury. The median non-health care and healthcare costs by injury were: falls-$19,978 and $5,185, struck by falling object- $32,398 and $8,625, struck against-$12,667 and $5,741, machinery related-$26,480 and $6,643, caught in or between- $24,130 and $4,389, and overexertion-$7,801 and $2,710. The total cost was $10,374,115 for non-healthcare and $1,764,137 for healthcare. The compensation agency did not compensate $874,871(8.4%) of the non-health care costs and $200,588 (11.4%) of the healthcare costs. Conclusion: Eliminating avoidable work-related injury events can save significant resources.

Keywords: British Columbia, compensation, cost of injury, sawmills, work-related injury

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