APPLICATION OF THE POISSON DISTRIBUTION IN THE STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF OCCUPATIONAL INJURIES IN THE COMPANY “LUKA RIJEKA”(“THE PORT OF RIJEKA”)

Improving safety at work can be considered as the general objective of statistical analysis of accidents at work. Within this general objective, specific goals can be singled out such as obtaining valid and reliable information on the basis of which company's management can put in place an efficient policy of improving the safety management system. The likelihood that an injury will occur in a given time interval is equal to the number of injured workers and the total number of workers in the observed group. Experience generally shows that the probability of injury in the period of one year is much less than one, therefore work related injuries can be considered as “a rare event”. As work related injuries can occur again considering the fact that one worker can suffer one, two, three or more identical or different injuries, the distribution of the number of injuries (frequency) can be observed per workers. It is usually assumed that the distribution of the number of injuries is well described by the Poisson distribution. Studies carried out in the preparation of this work, were based on the annual Report on Safety at Work of the Safety at Work Department in Luka Rijeka (“The Port of Rijeka”) where the Poisson distribution was used as a statistical method in analyzing occupational injuries. The objective of this work is to highlight the need for systematic research with the aim of further reducing work related injuries in the port processes. By applying the statistical method in the analysis of work related injuries we received guidelines for the systematic study of injuries so that the “rare event“ (definition of injury in practice) could be completely eliminated.