Heat Exposure and Injury Risk in Washington State Outdoor Construction Workers: A Case-Crossover Study Using High Resolution Meteorological Data and Workers' Compensation Injury Claims

Objectives: The primary objective of this study was to assess the relationship between heat exposure and occupational injuries in construction workers. Methods: The relationship between maximum daily humidex, a measure of apparent temperature, and Washington State Fund workers’ compensation injuries in outdoor construction workers was assessed using a case-crossover design with time-stratified referent selection. Warm month (March-October) adult outdoor construction traumatic injury claims from 2000-2012 were spatiotemporally joined with high-resolution meteorological data. Conditional logistic regression with linear splines was used to assess the association between maximum daily humidex and injuries. Results: There were 63,720 traumatic injuries during the study period. The traumatic injury odds ratio (OR) was 1.0053 (95% CI 1.003, 1.007) per one° C change in humidex. In the splines analyses …