Analysis of unsafe human behavior related accidents in the mechanical engineering industry and benchmarking its solution

Abstract

Occupational safety is an important concern for all working individuals. Worldwide, economically active individuals constitute 60-70% of the adult male population, 30-60% of adult female population, and 23% of the population of children and adolescent who are 5 to 17 years old. (2). Over the course of the 20th century, substantial reductions were seen in the number of occupational deaths and injuries, at least in industrialized nations (2). Nonetheless, despite this progress, safety concerns in the workplace are still paramount. An examination of the available data shows that work related injures and death occur at an alarming and unacceptably high rate throughout the industrialized and developing nations. The estimates of yearly occupational injuries ranged from 4.85 million in the Former Socialist Economies of Europe to 24.42 million in China, with an overall estimate of 100.69 million for the world. Approximately 100,000 of these occupational injuries worldwide were fatal. More recent projections by the WHO in the year 2002, using data from 1998, suggested that annually there are 270.7 million occupational injuries and 354,753 occupational fatalities worldwide (2). Not surprisingly, the economic cost of occupational injuries is staggering. This data becomes more compelling when it is noticed that reports of occupational injuries may well be underestimated. For e.g. individuals in the military are excluded from such data, and epidemiological studies have shown that many injuries are either not reported or undocumented.