Ha Trong Nguyen

Project name/description
Cross sectional study on occupational injuries in Vietnam in 2001

In Vietnam, there are hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries due to occupational injuries every year. and these numbers keep increasing over the last ten years. Currently, data on occupational injuries are mostly based on worker registries. With a numerous number of farmer and unregistered worker who are not enrolled to any registry, injuries among them are generally not reported. Data from a community based survey would provide a more complete picture on injuries in general and occupational injury in particular. Using data from the Vietnam Multi-center Injury Survey in 2001, this study aims to provide a better data on the extent and nature of occupational injuries in Vietnam. Injuries occurred during the last 12 months were interviewed among a sample of 27,000 households in 8 ecological regions. This study extracted data of individuals who were more than 18 years old and reported to be working at the time of their injuries. In the 2001, the overall rate of occupational injury was 34.1/1000. Occupational injuries appear to be more common in rural than in urban areas, significantly higher among males females. The risk of being injured seems to increase with age, with highest rate among people aged more than 60. This is also the group having the highest proportion of severe and fatal injuries. Road traffic injuries were reported as the mechanism with highest rates, followed by fall, sharp objects, and animal bite. Among job categories, handicraft was the group with the highest rate of injury (45.7/1000) followed by retired or poor health individuals. Logistic regression was used to compare the risk of being injured in the most common mechanisms of injury among job categories. Controlling for age, sex, region and administrative areas, the risk of road traffic injuries among government officers was significant higher than most other job categories such as farmer (p < 0.001), petty trader (p = 0.005). Meanwhile, controlling for the same factors, compared to government officers, the risk of sharp object injuries among farmers was 3.8 times higher (p = 0.001), and that of handicraft workers was 2.9 times higher (p = 0.016). These figures indicate that there should be particular intervention focus on specific injury mechanism for different job categories in order to better control of occupational injuries.

Training/Education
September 2005 Ð present
University of Washington, USA
Master of Public Health, International Health Program, Epidemiology

January 2000 - December 2002
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
Bachelor of Health Sciences
Major field of study: Public Health with specialty in Epidemiology

March 1999 - December 1999
Hanoi University of Foreign Studies, Hanoi, Vietnam
General English Training
Pre-English for Academic Purposes
English for Academic Purposes

September 1998 - Febuary 1999
Freshman (one semester) at Hanoi College of Pharmacy, Hanoi, Vietnam.
After one semester in Hanoi College of Pharmacy, I received a scholarship sponsor by AusAID.

Professional Information
Department of Epidemiology
--Teaching assistant
--Research assistant

CIPPR (center for injury policy and prevention research).
--Researcher
--Consultant

Publications/Presentations
Le, VA, Tran HB, Le TH, Nguyen TH. An Ecological study on commune charateristics and the prevalence of active trachoma among children, Vietnam J Public Health, Nov. 2005. 4(4): p. 44-9.