Occupational injury among firefighters in Canada: a trends analysis of fatality and time-loss injury claims (2007–2021)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Occupational injury accounts for the highest rate of morbidity and mortality among firefighters, surpassing other occupations. Canada is particularly susceptible to fires and consequently increased health burden. This study examines trends in firefighters' injury and death claims across Canada, focusing on claim characteristics, mechanisms of injury and disease, and geographic distribution across provinces and territories. METHODS: Data on accepted fatality and time-loss injury claims were collected from the Association of Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada (AWCBC) and WorkSafeBC over 15 years (2007-2021). Linear regression models were used to assess trends in time-loss injury and fatality claims. Chi-square tests were conducted to analyze the distribution of fatalities and injuries across age groups. RESULTS: A total of 29,499 claims were analyzed, including 1,509 fatalities and 27,990 time-loss injuries, with males representing 92.2% of injury and 99.4% of fatality claims. Cancer was the leading cause of fatalities, accounting for 84.6% of claims with a fatality rate of 993.7 per 100,000 firefighters per year. Traumatic injuries were the primary cause of time-loss claims, comprising 80.6% of cases with a rate of 17,859.1 per 100,000 firefighters per year. Mental health-related claims saw a significant 231.2% increase. The "65 and over" age group had the highest fatality claims (n = 826, 54.7%), with statistically significant differences observed in the distribution of fatalities and injuries between age groups (p = 0.002 < 0.05). Ontario reported the most fatalities (n = 713, 47.3%) and time-loss claims (n = 8591, 30.7%), followed by Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta. CONCLUSION: This study highlights the increasing burden of cancer among Canadian firefighters and the sharp rise in mental health-related claims, emphasizing the need for further research into the occupational health risks faced by firefighters to improve their long-term well-being.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".