Early workplace injuries predict future lost-time claims: Study

Employment duration before the first lost-time workplace injury may help predict future lost-time injuries, according to a study published in October’s issue of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Researchers with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore aimed to “identify a simple surrogate to predict the future risk of multiple lost-time injuries,” scouring data of employees of an academic medical center who suffered 5,906 injuries and were followed from 1994 to 2017, according to a study abstract.

Among the results, researchers found that a worker who suffers an injury on the job within six months of employment are more than twice as likely to have three or more lost-time injuries during their entire duration of employment.

For each year employed before the first lost-time injury, the probability of having three or more lost-time injuries decreased by 13%, according to the study.

Absence from the data are detailed information of underlying risk factors, according to an abstract.