Today’s Major Workplace Challenges: Weather, Safety, and Mental Health

According to the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI), the three biggest challenges for today’s worker are weather, safety and mental health. NCCI Senior Economist Patrick Coate and NCCI Assistant Actuary Anne Myers note that increasingly safer workspaces and new safety technologies, behavioral and mental health issues, and our operating environments are all poised to play a bigger role in what drives injuries and in bringing injured workers back to work. In their assessment of the impact of the changing workplace on workers and its implications for workers compensation, Coate and Myers stress key insights.

Weather: The weather presents workers with increasingly hazardous working conditions due to record-breaking temperatures and extreme weather.

• Days with extreme temperatures, both hot and cold, exhibit 2%-10% more injuries.
• The largest effects of hot days are seen in outdoor sectors, particularly construction.
• On cold days, a larger effect is seen for cold and wet (icy) days, which lead to conditions that result in demonstrably more slip and fall injuries. The transportation sector is significantly impacted for both hot and cold temperatures.

Patrick Coates explains: “Our new NCCI research shows worker injuries increase by as much as 10% on very hot days as well as on wet and freezing days compared to mild weather. High temperatures impact construction and other outdoor workers most, while cold and wet weather leads to a lot more slip and fall injuries.”

Safety: Work injuries associated with specific movements and activities persist across industries.

• Hazardous movements like lifting, pushing, or pulling account for most strain injuries, prompting advances in safety technology for sectors like Manufacturing and Warehousing.
• Strains, slips, and falls are the most common causes of lost-time injuries in workers compensation, accounting for more than 60% of lost-time claims in any given sector.
• Given the prevalence of these incidents across sectors, there could be promising applications of safety technology across sectors that mitigate or prevent some of these injuries.

Anne Myers emphasizes, “Addressing these common injuries through advanced safety measures could yield substantial benefits across industries.”

Mental health: Concerns for worker well-being as diagnosed mental disorders reach all-time highs.

• On average, claims with a mental diagnosis are 6 times more expensive than those without such diagnoses. This is mainly driven by differences in the distribution of medical conditions.
• Injured workers with high-severity injuries are more likely to be diagnosed with mental disorders, in particular when experiencing chronic pain or a traumatic brain injury. Nearly half of all claims with incurred amounts exceeding $500K are diagnosed with a mental disorder.
• Adjusting for a mix of medical conditions and surgery, the NCCI finds that claims with a mental diagnosis are 2.5 times more costly, indicating the higher unadjusted differential is primarily due to the mix of underlying medical conditions.

Prescription drugs are the largest share of costs of these claims followed by home health care and medical equipment. High severity medical conditions like traumatic brain injury (TBI) or chronic pain have the highest shares of mental diagnosis. Vaping-related diagnoses are on the rise.

Anne Myers notes: “New research from NCCI shows that claims exceeding $100,000 are 12 times more likely to be diagnosed with an associated mental condition during the course of treatment, underscoring the potential for the impact of mental health in large claims.”

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