Citation

McNamara J, Mohammadrezaei M, Dillon E, Meredith D. Front. Public Health 2022; 10: e1074673.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Frontiers Editorial Office)

DOI

10.3389/fpubh.2022.1074673

PMID

36743190

PMCID

PMC9889641

Abstract

This paper describes identifying a farm workplace injury risk factor associated with the presence of children/youth on Irish farms. Under Irish safety, health and welfare at work legislation a person in the age category of 0-18 years old or still at school are considered a child or young person. However, as the UN defines youth as persons between the ages of 15 and 24 years, this definition related to youth age is used in this paper (1). The presence of children/youth has been overlooked in past studies seeking to identify farm workplace injury risk factors in agriculture. A risk factor has been described as a factor related to the probability of an injury, which allows a population to be subdivided into risk category groups based on the presence or absence of the identified risk factor (2). Gaining information to allow risk factor(s) identification is a prerequisite to developing effective and tailored prevention strategies (2).

To identify a risk factor, securing data related to farm workplace injury occurrence and associated population factors is necessary. A means of gaining data on farm workplace injuries in Ireland has been by use of the National Farm Survey (NFS) operated by Teagasc--the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority. The NFS is part of the European Union (EU) Farm Accounts Data Network (FADN), which collects physical, technical and financial data on a nationally representative sample of farms throughout Europe. In addition to core FADN data, the NFS collects data pertaining to sustainability, including social aspects such as health and safety. As such, the NFS has previously been used to gain estimates of farm workplace injury levels through an additional survey mechanism (3). Farm workplace injury survey data gained has been successfully analyzed in association with core NFS data, which provides a considerable range of socio-economic variables, to explore farm workplace injury risks...

Language: en

Keywords

Adolescent; Child; Humans; Risk Factors; Ireland; risk factor; *Working Conditions; *Workplace; children and youth; dairying; farm survey; Farms; workload