| dc.description.abstract | The study reported in this dissertation assesses and determines the prevalence of sickness and injury in the Zambian industry from a micro level by taking Nakambala Sugar Estate as a case study.
The study was a cross-sectional survey which targeted three main sources of data: firstly, the workers; secondly, departmental and sectional supervisors and managers; and, thirdly, the medical records from the estate clinic.
A sample of 238 workers randomly selected and 20 supervisors and managers from a total of5298 labour force were interviewed. The sample of workers was drawn from the unionised workers employed on seasonal and permanent terms of service.Semi-strucmred questionnaires consisting of pre-coded and open-ended questions were used for data collection.This stody has revealed a high prevalence of sickness and injuries at Nakambala Sugar estate. In 1996, a total of 49,738 episodes of sickness were treated at the estate clinic. The total number of cases for three months (October, -November and December) was 9,653 giving a period prevalence of 32.8 per cent or 328 cases for every 1000 people. The prevalence was calculated from an estimated base population of 30,000 workers and their families. The period prevalence was further broken down for 5 common diseases as follows; malaria 1378 (4.59%), diarrhoeal diseases 1384 (4.62%), upper respiratory tract infections 1736 (5.79%), skin infections 579 (1.93 %) and injuries 555 (1.85 %).During the survey, 89 (37.4%) workers reported having suffered from a serious illness or injury since coming to Nakambala. The majority (85.4%) of those who reported having suffered serious illness (n=89) attributed the cause to the nature of the jobs they were doing. A very small proportion (6.7%) attributed cause to other factors such as witchcraft. Those who did not know the cause of sickness constituted 7.9%. A large proportion (73.1%) of the workers considered their current jobs to be potentially risky to health, whilst 76.48% knew jobs other than their current ones that they considered risky. One hundred and Seventy (71.7%) respondents reported being aware of people who had been injured whilst on duty. | en_US |
