Occupational injury and associated factors among construction workers in Ethiopia: a systematic and meta-analysis

Occupational injury is any personal injury, disease or death resulting from an occupational accident sustained on worker in connection with the performance of his or her work. Studies conducted in Ethiopia indicated variable findings ranging from 30% to 84.7% prevalence of occupational injury among construction workers. Therefore, the main aim of this systematic and meta-analysis was to pool the estimates and find the reasons for variability of the findings.

The review has been registered at PROSPERO with registration identification number CRD42020222785. PubMed, Advanced Google search and Google Scholar databases were searched up to June 20, 2020 to identify relevant articles. Stata v14 (StataCorp, College Station, Texas, USA) was used for meta-analysis. Publication bias was assessed by the funnel plot and more objectively by Egger's regression test. I-squared statistics was used to check the heterogeneity of the studies.

This research searched a total of, 1241articles, from these articles 1189 from PubMed, 21 from advanced Google search and 31 from Google scholar databases. A total of 12 studies were included in the analysis and all of them were institutional based cross-sectional studies. All studies were conducted from 2004 to 2018 but published from 2007 to 2019. The prevalence of occupational injury among included studies ranges from 30% to 84.7% while the pooled prevalence of occupational injury among construction workers was 45.64% with 95%CI (33.54-57.74). The effect of each variables against occupational injury was pooled and PPE use [AOR = 1.75, 95%CI (1.46, 2.1)], occupational safety training [AOR = 1.63, 95%CI (1.13, 2.34)] and existence of regular supervision [AOR = 1.4, 95%CI (1.16, 1.68)] were significantly associated to occupational injury among construction workers at p-value ≤ 0.05 with 95% CI.

The prevalence of occupational injury among construction workers is still very high and variables such as PPE use, occupational safety training and existence of regular supervision were factors affecting occupational injury among construction workers. Supply and use of PPE, provision of occupational safety training and regular supervision of workers has to be in place in order to reduce or remove occupational injury among construction workers in Ethiopia.