Evaluating the Efficiency of Checklists Used to Assess Risk of Musculoskeletal Disorders

Abstract

Checklists are commonly used to identify jobs considered at-risk for musculoskeletal disorders and to prioritize the identified jobs with regard to remediation. Often an objective criterion for determining the checklist score that indicates a job is at-risk is not known. A poorly drawn criterion score may cause a checklist to perform less effectively at identifying at-risk jobs than guessing. This paper describes a method to objectively determine a minimum score necessary to correctly identify at-risk jobs that is better than randomly guessing. The method incorporates prevalence into the determination of the probability that a positive checklist score truly indicates an at-risk job.