Abstract
Personal Support Workers (PSWs) are at particular risk in slippery condition. One-hundred-and-ten PSWs were recruited and asked to report on exposure to icy surfaces, slips and falls in weekly online surveys. Fifty participants (the intervention group) were provided one of two casual winter footwear models that performed the best in our lab-based testing. The remaining sixty participants (the control group) wore their own footwear for the eight-week period. Results showed that PSWs wearing our recommended footwear reported a 68% lower slip rates (control = 1.285, intervention = 0.413, p < 0.05) and 78% lower fall rate (control = 0.0859, intervention = 0.01812, p < 0.05) compared to workers wearing their own footwear. Findings demonstrate there are clear benefits of injury prevention and sizable net cost savings that would result from encouraging/requiring slip resistant winter footwear use for PSWs. The benefits would be similar in any industry where workers are exposed to outdoor winter conditions.
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Bagheri, Z.S., Beltran, J., Holyoke, P., Sole, G., Hutchinson, K., Dutta, T. (2020). Reducing the Risk of Falls by 78% with a New Generation of Slip Resistant Winter Footwear. In: Goossens, R., Murata, A. (eds) Advances in Social and Occupational Ergonomics. AHFE 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 970. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20145-6_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20145-6_27
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