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Classifying Risk Factors of Workers' Health Impairments in Accordance with Occupational Health and Safety Science Theories: a Narrative Review
Background: Work settings play an important role in explaining a certain level of injuries or the prevalence of disorders among workers. Safety science theories attempt to identify predisposing determinants of occupational disorders to explain why certain occupational conditions impair employee health. At the same time, theoretical studies rarely explain what particular risk factors (that is, variables) have to be included in these “grouped” determinants. As a result, it is unclear whether some risk factors belong to the same group of determinants in different theoretical models. This lack of clarity could confuse researchers who try to understand which factors are easy to modify, which are not modifiable, and what interventions are needed in occupational health management. In this context, it can be important to examine how the risk factors used in empirical studies can be classified in accordance with safety science theories. Therefore, it could be possible to gain a better understanding what risk factors play an important role in predicting health outcomes in accordance with theoretical explanation. In addition, the expected result could suggest an avenue for a further development of surveys and polls in occupational health to make them compatible with the more established safety science theories. Objectives: We attempt to identify the most important groups of risk factors of workers' health outcomes that empirical studies use while taking into account different occupational safety and health theories. Methods: A narrative umbrella review relies on a structured examination of relevant literature and a synthesis of the evidence identified. We searched for systematic reviews and meta-analyses that studied employees' risk factors of health outcomes. In order to did so, we used PubMed (Medline), Web of Science, and SCOPUS databases. To be used, all the records had to have been published in an English-language peer-reviewed journal from 2009 to 2019. After that, we collected information about risk factors and their importance to some occupational illnesses and matched these risk factors with the existing occupational safety science theories. Results: The results showed that some risk factors were considered to be important predisposing inputs in theories and, indeed, as empirical evidence showed, they are important in practice. At the same time, certain factors were unimportant in empirical studies, although theories stressed that they can be important. In addition, some factors were widely used in empirical research, but it is difficult to explain their role in occupation health from the theoretical viewpoint because they were not explained in detail by the existing theories. Moreover, some factors remained unclassified, and their use implies explanations on the basis of common sense rather than theoretical knowledge. This fact stresses that the current surveys of employees have to be better adjusted to the current occupational health theories