Iran Occupational Health

 Background and aims: Occupational stress and risk perception are considered as the most well-known factors affecting the safety and health of employees and the occurrence of occupational accidents. On the other hand, occupational accidents also have a very undesirable effect on the performance of organizations, companies and their human resources. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between risk perception, resources and level of occupational stress and occupational accidents in one of the steel industries in Guilan Province.
Methods: This research was a case-control analytical study carried out among 700 steel rolling workers in a steel industry. The sample number was 248 based on the Morgan table. The number of 81 workers with work-related injuries during 2013-2017 were assigned as the case group and 167 workers without work-related injuries were randomly selected as the control group. Participants with informed consent completed 3 questionnaires as a 50-item questionnaire for sources of job stress, a 20-item  Davis’s questionnaire for job stress and a 133 –item  Flynn’s questionnaire for risk perception. The data were analysed using SPSS software version 20.
results: All study samples were male. The most of participants had the diploma degree, 93% were married, and 72% were shift workers. The results showed that there was no significant difference between each of the demographic characteristics such as shift work, marital status and education degree with occupational stress and risk perception variables for both the case and control groups. The mean occupational stress in the case and control groups was 54.02 and 48.09, respectively and there was a statistically significant relationship between occupational accidents and level of occupational stress (p value < 0.05). Also, the value of odds ratio was obtained 1.4, which showed that job stress increased the probability of accident by 40%. The overall score of sources of job stress for the case and control groups were 127.8 and 121.4, respectively, which did not show a statistically significant difference between the two groups, but in some areas the difference was significant (p value <0.05). The highest difference was observed in the heavy duty of the role (p <0.05). The case and control groups respectively received 66% and 61.8% of the risk perception score that showed there was a significant difference between the case and control group score (p < 0.05).
Conclusion: The present study showed that there was a significant and direct relationship between sources and levels of job stress and occupational accidents and the workers with work-related injuries had a higher risk perception than non-injured workers. One of the important functions of risk perception is its positive effect on the analysis of environmental data and occupational processes and appropriate decision making, as well as improvement of the effective reactive approach in the workplace. One of the important results of this research was demonstrating the relationship of risk perception on workers’ experience of accidents and environmental safety issues. The transfer of experience and the development of an experience-based learning program are effective in increasing the level of risk perception of workers and in strengthening the reactive approach to workplace events and is directly effective in reducing the number and severity of occupational accidents. Identifying sources of job stress in the workplace and eliminating, controlling or modifying it, as well as implementing an operational plan for managing job stress and promoting workers' risk perception, are effective in reducing employee stress and accordingly in reducing the incidence of occupational accidents and thus promoting the level of physical and mental health and the level of productivity of employees and the reduction of occupational injuries and associated direct and indirect costs.