Drexel University’s Firefighter Injury Research & Safety Trends (FIRST) project recently released a manuscript on firefighter injury data. According to the report, fire departments and their municipalities could be shorting their budgets by hundreds of thousands of dollars since limited resources are keeping them from accurately counting firefighter injury data.
Combining data from four different databases to look at injury occurrence and reporting in the Philadelphia Fire Department, FIRST researchers discovered that, once injuries were more accurately coded, the difference in workers’ compensation costs was as much as $1 million for some injuries.
“It is very important for fire departments to understand causes and cost of injury in order to ensure their limited budget is being properly distributed,” said Shannon Widman, project manager at FIRST and lead author on the study, “The benefits of data linkage for firefighter injury surveillance,” which was published in Injury Prevention. “If departments can accurately pinpoint specific injuries that lead to specific costs, they are empowered to prioritize decisions when considering prevention.”
Read more about it HERE and access the full study HERE.
