Journal of Nursing and Health Studies

Discovering the hidden costs of Nonfatal Occupational injuries and illnesses in Agricultural works in Thailand

World Summit on Occupational Health and Public Safety
February 09-10, 2022 | Webinar

Densak Yogyorn

Mahidol University, Thailand

ScientificTracks Abstracts: J Nurs Health Stud

Abstract

Thailand lacks occupational injury and illness (OII) surveillance data for its agricultural sector, which is not covered by the workers compensation system, yet comprises 34% of the total Thai workforce. The aim of this study was to use the limited existing data from the Universal Health Care System (UHCS) to estimate the medical costs of OII’s from agricultural work in Thailand. The results showed that in 2017 OII medical costs shifted to the UHCS totalled $47 million (USD), representing ~0.2% of the GDP produced by the Thai agricultural sector in 2017. We recommend that some of the national funds that are currently used for medical treatment of OII’s, should instead be used to develop and implement prevention programs in agriculture, which would improve not only worker health and safety, but also productivity. The availability of short term and disability losses to work time data could enable better public health policy formulation.This is the first report on the number and medical treatment costs of occupational injuries and illnesses in the Thai agricultural sector. Other reports on OII’s have utilized data from the Workers Compensation System, which are only available to formal sector employees. This study is unique in utilizing the UCHS data to identify 1,704,655 occupational injuries among agricultural workers for 2017.The field, crop and vegetable growers had the largest number of visits and medical costs for occupational injuries, result from the wide range of activities and equipment used during land preparation, planting, cultivating and harvesting. Nevertheless, animal producers and livestock handlers suffered more severe injuries, as evidenced by higher per visit medical costs for injuries. This study estimated the annual medical costs attributed to Musculoskeletal Disease (MSDs) about 28% of the total medical cost of all agricultural OII’s.

Biography

Densak Yogyorn has 24 years of experiences in Occupational Health, Safety (OHS) in many process industries, factories, and construction projects before joined the faculty of public health, Mahidol University. Unlike formal work which covered by worker compensation system, agricultural workers (so-called informal workers) have no privilege like that. Densak has built this model for estimating the costs of occupational injuries and illnesses among agricultural workers to enable the policy makers to realize this issue.