Concept 7: study and prevent occupational accidents using the Haddon Matrix
So far we have seen that occupational health is related to how we can protect the health of the worker and how we can fit the worker to the job and the job to the worker; we have also seen that in occupational health, our role is to identify if an exposure is causing harm to the worker, and to promote the worker's health, prevent illnesses, and if the worker falls ill, then arrange for treatment and rehabilitate if needed. One of the issues with occupational health is not just identifying and mitigating health hazards or those which can affect health states after a certain lag period, but also, to mitigate the effects of physical hazards that impact the lives of workers. Such physical hazards involve accidents, and impacts with physical, chemical, biological forces that have health impacts due to transfer of energy from source to the recipient. Injuries are a special case, where a systematic approach can minimize the risk of injuries in workplaces.
William Haddon provided a workflow and a framework for injury prevention with motor vehicle accidents, but this has been used for injury prevention in a wide range of applications. Instead of focusing only on human behaviours, Haddon hypothesised that the end result of an injury could be minimised in three phases: before the event occurred, during the event occurred, and after the event occurred. For example, in a motor vehicle crash related injury prevention scenario, one could think in terms of human factors, agent (vehicle in this case), the physical environment, and the social environment all could be thought of. The pre-event (before even the crash were to occur), one could think of the human factor as wearing a seat belt and educating people to ensure 100% seat belt use. The agent or vehicle could be fitted with warning signs and sounds till the person were to wear seat belts (or technology would be such that the car would not start if the seat belts were not worn). The physical environment before the crash could be made safer by creating speed breakers, and the social environment could include, for example, by police patroling. During the event, the human factor might include ejection from the car, the vehicle factor might include design to resist the impact through design, the physical environment might include wide medians on the highway so that instead of crashing into a median divider, the car would find itself on a median grassy land, and so on. The post event human factors might include prompt action by rescue trauma team (human factor), deployment of airbags (vehicle/agent factor), clear visibility (physical environmental factor), and creating safe passageways for the ambulance to arrive or a rescue helicopter can take the passengers and the drive away from the scene to a nearby hospital for treatment.
For a range of occupational injuries, particularly those with physical hazards, one can think of constructing similar Haddon Matrices.

Haddon Matrix: