Occupational injuries in Kazakhstan: a health and economic burden assessment, 2023-2025

Abstract

Relevance: Injuries at the workplace lead to public health issues all over the world. Most of these injuries take place in a country with an economy that is heavily dependent on the industrial sector. Kazakhstan's mining, construction, and other hazardous industries cause a huge contribution to that problem. Injuries remain common in these sectors and have major health and economic ramifications. Nonetheless, limited national assessments incorporate both health impacts and economic impacts. Methods: Retrospective ecological analysis of national statistics on occupational accidents and fatalities was performed, specifically covering the administrative regions. This analysis included various burden indicators: compensation payments; productivity losses measured via the Human Capital Approach; and Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) estimates. In addition, the study focuses on temporal trends, sectoral differences, and regional variation, descriptive statistics, regression analysis, and spatial visualization were employed. Results: The findings indicated marked differences across regions in relation to the compensation payments made per injured worker. In addition, the cost distribution was found to be strongly right-skewed, indicating that a small number of high-cost cases accounted for the bulk of costs. Sick-leave payments were found to be strongly positively correlated with total support payments. Higher injury severity and longer time to recovery will be associated with higher economic consequences. DALY estimates indicate that the health burden of occupational injuries was mainly due to early death. The annual losses in productivity were estimated to be about 55-72 billion KZT. A recent international comparison of absenteeism-related productivity losses shows that Kazakhstan experienced significantly higher total losses in comparison with individual European countries. Conclusion: These study shows the significant and unevenly distributed health and economic burden of occupational injuries in Kazakhstan. Strengthening occupational safety policies, improving surveillance systems, and targeting high-risk industries may contribute to reducing both health impacts and economic losses.