Literacy and risk of occupational injury

OBJECTIVE: We examined whether low literacy skills are a risk factor for occupational injury during a 5.3-year follow-up period.

METHODS: The study population was taken from the Danish participants in the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) in 2011/2012. Literacy skills were based on the PIAAC survey. Data on occupational injuries were obtained from national registers. We included the 5997 employees aged 16-65 who worked during the follow-up period. We used Cox regression to estimate the risk of occupational injury as a function of literacy skills. We adjusted the analysis for gender, age, nationality at birth, educational level, occupation, weekly work hours and month of survey completion.

RESULTS: Literacy skills were divided into four categories based on the six levels of skills in PIAAC. With the highest level of literacy skills as the reference (level 4/5), the hazard ratios for occupational injury were estimated at 1.58 (95% CI 0.80-3.15) for literacy level 3, 2.04 (95% CI 0.99-4.19) for literacy level 2 and 2.29 (95% CI 1.08-4.86) for literacy level 0/1.

CONCLUSION: Employees with a low level of literacy skills are at a higher risk of occupational injury than employees with a high level of literacy skills.