Enterprise size and risk of hospital treated injuries among manual construction workers in Denmark: a study protocol

To investigate the relation between enterprise size and injury rates in the Danish construction industry.All male construction workers in Denmark aged 20-59 years will be followed yearly through national registers from 1999 to 2006 for first hospital treated injury (ICD-10: S00-T98) and linked to data about employment status, occupation and enterprise size. Enterprise size-classes are based on the Danish business pattern where micro (less than 5 employees), small (5-9 employees) and medium-sized (10-19 employees) enterprises will be compared to large enterprises (at least 20 employees). The analyses will be controlled for age (five-year age groups), calendar year (as categorical variable) and occupation. A multi-level Poisson regression will be used where the enterprises will be treated as the subjects while observations within the enterprises will be treated as correlated repeated measurements.This follow-up study uses register data that include all people in the target population. Sampling bias and response bias are thereby eliminated. A disadvantage of the study is that only injuries requiring hospital treatment are covered.Injuries related to construction work remain a serious problem worldwide. Although many prevention efforts and intervention programs have been undertaken [1,2], it is a known fact that construction workers continue to carry a particularly high risk of sustaining fatal and nonfatal injuries. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that more than 100,000 construction workers around the world die every year - that is one person every five minutes [3]. In the European Union (EU-15 + Norway), workers employed in the construction sector from 1995 to 2005 showed the second highest incidence rate of fatal injuries at work and the highest incidence rate of nonfatal injuries at work [4]. Yet an overall trend of improvement is worth noting, as the total number of injuries in construction dropped 16% over the ten-year period. Still, the seri