"Mental overload" a main cause of workplace accidents
Psychological overload was the most mentioned cause of workplace accidents in the Netherlands in 2021, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reported. In 2021, 196,000 employees had an accident at work. Almost a fifth of them blamed psychological overload.
About 100,000 employees were absent from work for one or more days due to a workplace accident. Of them, 19 percent said the cause of the accident was psychological overload. The largest group of employees with psychological overload work in a care or welfare profession.
Other common causes of workplace accidents were slipping, tripping, or another fall (15 percent) and heavy lifting (14 percent).
Workplace accidents were most common in transport and logistics professions, like truck drivers and mobile machine operators. In 2021, 2.8 percent of workers in these professions had a workplace accident resulting in absenteeism. According to CBS, employees in transport professions often do physically demanding work, have to work shifts, and don’t have much say in how they perform their duties.
Other professions with high accident rates are technical (2.5 percent) and agricultural (2.2 percent) - also physically demanding work. Absenteeism due to a workplace accident is lowest in the IT sector (0.4 percent). The average for all employees was 1.3 percent.
