Monitoring Industrial Injuries: A Case Study

This paper presents a new statistical approach for actively using information commonly available in medical surveillance systems to monitor the incidence and severity of industrial injuries on particular operations. The procedures require the practitioner to track the exposure time between injuries. An "out of control" situation is detected when the test statistic exceeds an optimal decision limit, which is determined by minimizing' the total injury costs per exposure hour on each operation. The use of this test is presented in the context of a case example from an industrial assembly operation.