Hospital Records Reveal Sector-Specific Injury Patterns Among Injured Workers in Türkiye

Occupational injuries treated at a single tertiary hospital in Türkiye over five years show sharply different profiles depending on the sector in which they occurred, according to a retrospective cross-sectional study published in Archives of Public Health. Researchers at Ordu University Training and Research Hospital analysed 402 occupational injury cases documented through forensic medical records between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2023, spanning construction workers, nurses, motorcycle couriers, and employees in manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, security, and office work.

The study population was predominantly male, at 66.9 percent, with a mean age of 33.5 years and nearly half of all cases, 45.5 percent, aged between 18 and 29. Construction and building was the largest sector, accounting for 22.1 percent of cases, followed closely by healthcare at 21.4 percent and logistics and transportation at 16.4 percent. The most common individual occupations were construction workers, nurses, and motorcycle couriers. Physical trauma dominated the injury types, making up 95.3 percent of cases, while biological exposures accounted for 3.0 percent, chemical exposure for 1.5 percent, and combined physical and chemical exposure for a single case.

One of the most striking findings concerns infectious exposure risk. Although biological-type events were formally coded in only 3.0 percent of cases, a separate binary variable capturing documented needlestick injury or body-fluid splash identified potential infectious disease transmission in 86 cases, or 21.4 percent of the sample. Among the 75 medical needlestick injuries, 98.6 percent involved needles that were non-sterile at the time of the incident. Only 10 individuals, 2.5 percent of all cases, were documented as using personal protective equipment when the event occurred. The authors note that these findings identify sharps safety as a sustained prevention target in healthcare settings, consistent with prior research showing that healthcare workers continue to encounter contaminated instruments in clinical practice.

Anatomically, the upper extremity dominated. Hand and finger injuries were the single most common injury region at 35.3 percent, followed by other upper-extremity injuries involving the wrist, forearm, elbow, or arm at 18.7 percent. Within the detailed hand and finger data, the left thumb, left second finger, and right thumb were the most frequently affected sites, a pattern the authors link to the prevalence of sharp-instrument injuries among healthcare workers and to task positioning during manual procedures in a predominantly right-hand-dominant population. Within the healthcare sector, biologically mediated events disproportionately produced hand and finger injuries as well as head, face, and neck injuries, whereas construction workers more often sustained wrist, forearm, and arm trauma.

Multiple injuries, defined as trauma involving more than one anatomical region, occurred in 35.8 percent of cases and clustered strongly in high-energy sectors. In binary logistic regression using the health sector as the reference, the adjusted odds of multiple injuries were significantly higher in manufacturing and industry, with an odds ratio of 12.82, in electrical and mechanical work, with an odds ratio of 44.43, and in construction, with an odds ratio of 4.64. The electrical and mechanical estimate, however, rests on only four cases and carries an extremely wide confidence interval of 3.72 to 531.12, a limitation the authors flag explicitly. Accident mechanism also mattered: relative to falls, non-medical sharp or penetrating incidents and heterogeneous other mechanisms carried significantly lower odds of multiple injuries, while traffic and vehicle-related events showed higher odds that did not reach conventional statistical significance.

Complementary within-sample relative risk analyses reinforced the same pattern. Compared with the health sector, the proportion of presenting cases with multiple injuries was markedly higher in logistics and transportation, manufacturing and industry, and construction. Traffic-related incidents produced a 31 percent higher proportion of multiple injuries than falls, and across the whole sample, multiple injuries were most frequently associated with traffic accidents, at 74.6 percent of such cases, and falls, at 57.0 percent. Single injuries, by contrast, were predominantly linked to heterogeneous other mechanisms and to localized hand and finger trauma.

The temporal distribution added further texture. Annual case counts fell to 59 in 2020, coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, which the authors attribute plausibly to reduced workplace activity and altered healthcare-seeking behaviour, before rising to 113 cases in 2023, the highest of the five years. June, July, and December were the peak months, a seasonal pattern consistent with heightened summer construction activity and seasonal agricultural labour. Most injuries were treated quickly and without admission: 91.5 percent of patients were examined in the emergency department on the same day as the injury, and 93.8 percent were treated as outpatients, suggesting that the injuries captured in this dataset were predominantly of low clinical severity.

The authors are careful about what these numbers can and cannot show. Because the study compares only injured workers who reached a single hospital, and no workforce denominators by sector, age, or sex were available, all comparisons reflect within-sample proportions rather than population-level incidence rates. Case frequency in hospital data reflects not only injury occurrence but also workforce size, sectoral composition, and access to hospital care. Healthcare workers may be overrepresented because employees at or near the study institution have direct access to its emergency department and because their sharps and body-fluid exposures are subject to institutional post-exposure reporting procedures, while workers in informal sectors or remote areas, and fatal events occurring at the scene, are likely underrepresented. The authors therefore caution that the findings identify potential targets for prevention rather than ranking sectors or age groups by injury risk.

Within those constraints, the study argues that standardized medicolegal documentation offers a valuable unified framework for comparing injury mechanisms across occupations. In the meantime, the dataset points to concrete prevention priorities: avoiding needle recapping and using appropriate sharps disposal containers in healthcare, measures that prior research suggests can reduce needlestick injury risk by up to 80 percent, and fall- and traffic-related mechanisms in construction and logistics, where motorcycle couriers emerge as a specific target for interventions such as restricting task allocation during active riding and verifying protective equipment use.

Subject of Research: Sector-specific occupational injury patterns and determinants of multiple injuries among workers presenting to a tertiary hospital in Türkiye between 2019 and 2023.

Article Title: Occupational injury patterns in a hospital-based cross-sectional study in Türkiye: sectoral characteristics, injury profiles, and determinants of multiple injuries (2019–2023)

Article References: Aydogan, H. C., Unat Öztürk, Z., & Yaşar Teke, H. (2026). Occupational injury patterns in a hospital-based cross-sectional study in Türkiye: sectoral characteristics, injury profiles, and determinants of multiple injuries (2019–2023). Archives of Public Health, 84(1), Article 227. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13690-026-02121-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13690-026-02121-9

Keywords: occupational injuries, Türkiye, cross-sectional study, healthcare workers, needlestick injuries, construction sector, logistics, multiple injuries, forensic medical records, workplace safety, emergency department, injury prevention