TRENDS IN OCCUPATIONAL INJURIES – AN OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY INDICATOR IN FORESTRY SECTOR OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Abstract

Occupational safety is the prevention and elimination of dangers and hazards that can cause workplace injuries, occupational and other diseases and damage to the employees’ health. According to the modern concept, it implies constant monitoring of the situation with the aim to explore ways and design measures for the improvement of an occupational health and safety system. An effective way to monitor the situation in an occupational health and safety system is to define performance or success indicators, whereas, in practice, the most commonly used tool is occupational safety indicators. Indicators of work-related injuries can be absolute and relative. Since absolute indicators do not provide a realistic image of the state of workplace safety, we shall use relative indicators. A relative indicator of occupational safety often used is the injury frequency index. This indicator was obtained as the ratio of the number of injuries and effective working hours over the observation period or the number of employees in the production and business system. Also, the same indicator can be calculated in relation to the volume of production.

In the forestry sector, where occupational injuries are frequent and often fatal, monitoring indicators of occupational injuries allows us to see the movement of the observed phenomenon (occupational safety) in a certain period, and also to determine the general trend of its movement (decline or growth) and most importantly to develop preventive measures. In addition, the analysis of workplace injuries using the indicators enables the comparison of occupational safety in business systems from the same activity and, thus, foster the transfer of know-how and good practice from the systems with high levels of occupational safety.