Awareness and compliance with use of safety protective devices and patterns of injury among quarry workers in Sabon-Gari Local Government Area, Kaduna state North-Western Nigeria

Background: For years stone quarrying and crushing have been known as highly hazardous work, whereby workers are affected by many debilitating occupational health hazards and diseases. In Nigeria, the majority of quarry workers comprise people who are employed for manual labor, often under-educated and hence are not well grounded in the knowledge of the occupational safety measures required for the job. Aim: The aim was to determine the level of awareness and compliance with use of safety protective devices and the patterns of injury among quarry workers in Sabon-Gari Local Government Area. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out among 74 quarry workers who were randomly selected using the cluster-sampling technique in Sabon-Gari Local Government Area. A pretested semistructured interviewer-administered questionnaire was used as the tool for data collection. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 19.0 and Epi-info 6.0. Results: All the 74 respondents interviewed were males, and majority (90.5%) of whom were between the ages of 15 and 44 years, with 25-34 years age group constituting 32.4%. More than one-third of them (39.2%) had Quranic education as their highest level of education, 29.7% and 27.0% of them had primary and secondary levels of education respectively. None of the respondents had tertiary education. On issues of work safety, 68.9% think their work is not safe. Majority of the respondents (97.3%) were aware of safety protective devices. A total of 89.2% use at least one safety protective device or the other at work. However, 71.6% of these use the devices always, showing a high level of compliance. Most of the respondents (81.1%) had experienced at least one workplace injury or the other in the past, most commonly was hand injury (80.0%), leg injury (30.0%), eye injury (11.7%), and facial injury (8.3%). The findings also showed a significant relationship between monthly income and use of safety protective devices at work (χ2 = 6.611, df = 2, P = 0.1) and between number of work-hours per day and stress at or after work (χ2 = 9.509, df = 2, P = 0.1). Conclusion: This study revealed that majority of the quarry workers in Sabon-Gari Local Government Area knew that their job exposes them to health hazards. They have a high level of awareness on safety protective devices and use several of these devices, though with varying levels of compliance. Intensive health education campaigns and provision of adequately subsidized safety protective devices for the workers by the relevant authorities will go a long way in improving awareness and compliance with use of safety protective devices and reduction of hazards.