Developing a tool for identifying high-risk employers for inspection.

Area of Science:

• Occupational Health and Safety
• Risk Assessment
• Workplace Safety Regulations

Background:

• Workers' Compensation Board (WCB) data is often used to create an Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) index to identify high-risk businesses for inspections.
• The validity of this OHS index for accurately identifying high-risk employers has not been previously established.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of the existing Alberta OHS index, primarily based on WCB claims data.
• To determine if an OHS index constructed using alternative data sources could offer improved performance in identifying high-risk employers.

Main Methods:

• Utilized data from the Alberta Compliance Management Information System (2011-2015) and WCB claims database (2007-2014).
• Defined 'stop work' or 'stop use' orders issued during inspections as a proxy for high-risk outcomes.
• Assessed the predictive performance of the current and a modified OHS index using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and regression analyses.

Main Results:

• Neither the current nor the modified OHS index demonstrated significant effectiveness in identifying high-risk employers, for both large and small businesses.
• Area Under the ROC Curve (AROC) values were consistently low, indicating poor discriminatory power (e.g., AROCs ranging from 0.54 to 0.59).
• Subgroup analyses confirmed these findings, showing similar ineffectiveness regardless of employer size or specific inspection initiatives.

Conclusions:

• The current OHS index and a modified version are not reliable tools for identifying high-risk employers.
• The study suggests that distinct approaches may be necessary for assessing risk in large versus small employers due to heterogeneous performance patterns.