Occupational accidents and human errors in apartment custodians’ work

Abstract

BACKGROUND:

According to a survey of the economically active elderly population in South Korea, most of them are employed in the service sector, with many men working as custodians.

OBJECTIVE:

This study investigates the characteristics of injuries affecting apartment custodians, one of the representative jobs for older male workers, as well as the characteristics of accident causes based on human errors.

METHODS:

The study used information processing as a framework to identify the cause of accidents that affected 831 male apartment custodians. This study investigated the characteristics of injured persons and features of accidents.

RESULTS:

The majority of accidents were caused by human errors, in particular perceptual (45.5%) and action (26.9%) errors. The rate of accidents caused by human errors rose from 85.3% among those aged below 60 to 91.4% among those aged 70 or above. Furthermore, the rate of accidents caused by perceptual errors was higher among those aged 60 or above (45.0%) than those aged below 60 (31.4%).

CONCLUSIONS:

The findings of this study imply that accident prevention measures must be customized to older workers according to the different employment conditions.