The value of OSH: Estimating the societal costs of work-related injuries and diseases

Introduction

Insight into the financial consequences of work-related injuries and diseases provides governments, policy makers and employers’ organisations with relevant data for the purpose of developing OSH policies and agreements. Also, insight into these costs will help to raise awareness of the magnitude of the problem and will contribute to a more efficient allocation of resources for OSH. Different methods are developed to estimate these costs. A bottom-up model builds up from components of costs to total costs. In a top-down model the total costs are estimated via the total burden of injury and disease, and the estimated fraction that was caused by occupational…