Occupational health and safety awareness in wood, wood products and mushroom production sector in Turkey

The forest industry is one of the sectors where occupational accidents are the most common. In this study, it is aimed to reveal the differences in opinions of personnel in enterprises, which fall into Turkish wood, wood products and mushroom production group, concerning occupational health and safety. Within this framework, a questionnaire application was conducted based on face to face meeting in a total of 68 enterprises in Erzincan province. In the questionnaire, the 5-point likert rating scale was used in determination of agreement level to scale items containing 9 different opinions concerning occupational health and safety issue underlying demographic characteristics of personnel and features of enterprises. As the result of the study, it was detected that machinery maintenance frequencies are too far, necessary personal protective equipment is not supplied in time and basic occupational health and safety principle implementation has deficiencies. Besides, statistically significant differences (p<0.05) were identified between opinions of employees in relation to variances as age, marital status, department worked, total time of employment in the enterprise, machinery maintenance frequency that is applied, workplace change intervals and exposure to occupational accidents.