Abstract
Purpose: The recent major recalls of hazardous products caused consumer product safety acts to be strengthen worldwide. Although the recall system of hazardous products in Korea has been operating based on Framework Act on Product Safety since 2011, the evaluation of product risk has been relied on not the results of objective incident data but the results of illegal product investigations. The purpose of this paper is to propose a product risk assessment model for Korea using injury data. Methods: The authors derived Korea's risk assessment method by analysing the advantages and disadvantages of the most widely used models in advanced countries such as EU's RAPEX RAG and Janpan's R-MAP. In this study, the level of relative frequency and severity of injury are determined based on the objective incident data and the length of hospitalization respectively. In addition, the injury data occurred during 2011 is applied to the proposed risk assessment model for case study. Results: The data analysed in this paper can be classified as high risk, medium risk, low risk, acceptable risk, and safe products through the matrix f rom the combination of the relative frequency and the severity derived. Conclusion: The proposed risk assessment model in this study has advantage obtaining reliable objective results because it uses actual injury data and redeems the drawbacks of the existing models used in advanced countries. Furthermore, because the proposed model shows the high risk products among many, it is expected to be useful especially for customs whose main job is inspecting the imported goods and the government when selecting the target product groups for safety investigation.