ABSTRACT
About 226 people are killed each year in the United Kingdom in accidents that take place at work; that is 0.8 per 100,000 workers (2002/2003 statistics from HSC, 2003). The exact figure fluctuates a little from year to year. A further 28,426 are seriously injured, and nearly four and a half times this number sustain injuries that, although they are of a less severe nature, are none the less serious enough to keep them off work for three days or more (and thus find their way into the official statistics). Added to this, we have an unknown (but doubtless very great) number who sustain minor injuries requiring first aid treatment only and an unknown (but again large) number who develop diseases or ill health, of one sort or another, as a result of their work. An estimate of the prevalence of work-related ill-health (as distinct from the incidence of new cases in any one year) is that in 2001–2002, 2.3 million workers in the United Kingdom were suffering from an illness that they believed had been caused or made worse by their current or past work, which resulted in 33 million working days lost in that year (HSC, 2003).
