Category: Safety and Health Data
On-duty Injuries Among Ohio Law Enforcement Officers
Law enforcement officers (LEOs) face many workplace hazards. Current research does not include a complete picture of nonfatal injuries that officers sustain while on-duty. Workers’ compensation (WC) data are an underutilized source for occupational injury surveillance in the law enforcement field. A recently published research article explored patterns and characteristics of workers’ compensation injury claims over Read More >
Posted on byUsing Public Health Data to Protect Workers in the Oil and Gas Extraction Industry
Oil and gas extraction (OGE) workers play an important role in supporting the U.S. economy. In 2021, 326,160 workers were employed by OGE companies to help meet U.S. energy needs.1 This work is not done without risk. Workers in the OGE industry regularly face hazardous exposures such as flammable and toxic gases and vapors, Read More >
Posted on by 2 CommentsVisualizing Ohio Workers’ Compensation Claims by Event/Exposure
Research has shown that large state datasets of workers’ compensation (WC) claims can be successfully linked to state employment data to examine claim counts and rates by industry and cause of injury.1-6 This can give us better insight into industry trends, helping to focus attention towards areas where employers and workers would benefit most Read More >
Posted on byWork as a Key Social Determinant of Health: The Case for Including Work in All Health Data Collections
Social determinants of health (SDOH) are conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play. These conditions affect a wide range of health and quality of life risks and outcomes. CDC, the World Health Organization (WHO), and others recognize work as a social determinant of health.[1],[2],[3] Despite this recognition, this key SDOH Read More >
Posted on by 2 CommentsWhat Measures Can Companies Use to Evaluate Safety Management Practices and Identify Opportunities for Improvement?
What measures can companies use to evaluate safety efforts and identify opportunities for improvement? The most commonly used measures of safety performance are lagging indicators such as injury counts and costs.1,2 While lagging indicators can be beneficial, using them as the only measure of safety can be a barrier to safety improvement. For example, Read More >
Posted on by 3 Comments100 Million and Counting!
When researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) set out to develop a tool that could improve the use of industry and occupational data from surveys, death certificates and other sources, we could only dream that our efforts would be this successful. A Tool to Advance Research, and It’s Free We Read More >
Posted on by 3 CommentsNew Data Available! Assess Causes of Death by Industry and Occupation
Linking Causes of Death to Work Since the early years of National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), mortality data have been an important source of information to assess links between cause of death and work. In the 1980s, the National Occupational Mortality Surveillance (NOMS) program was born out of a collaboration between NIOSH, Read More >
Posted on by 2 CommentsLearning from Workplace Fatality Investigations
Each day, on average, 15 U.S. workers die as a result of a traumatic injury on the job. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) program is a research program designed to identify and study fatal occupational injuries. For nearly 40 years, the FACE program has Read More >
Posted on byUsing Machine Learning to Code Occupational Surveillance Data: A Cooperative Effort between NIOSH and the Harvard Computer Society – Tech for Social Good Program
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) depends on surveillance data collected through the occupational supplement to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS-Work) to study and understand nonfatal occupational injuries. Collected through an interagency agreement with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, NEISS-Work captures hospital emergency department-treated occupational injuries to paid, self-employed, Read More >
Posted on by 2 CommentsChanging with the Times: The Journey to Interactive Charts
Our world is constantly evolving. Computers that used to occupy an entire room now fit in the palm of our hands. Information that used to require hours of searching, sorting, and reading is now available with the click of a button. Similarly, the way NIOSH shares work-related public health surveillance data has evolved to Read More >
Posted on by 1 CommentImproving Our Understanding of Nonfatal Occupational Injuries
Counting and describing nonfatal occupational injuries are vital to understanding and prevention. However, this is very difficult to accomplish on a national level. There are large numbers of injuries that are captured, in part, by different sources, and some are not captured at all. There is no single, comprehensive national source of occupational injury Read More >
Posted on by 2 CommentsMeasuring Workplace Risks across States
When assessing workplace safety in the United States, we have to consider what measures of risk to use. If all measures are strongly positively correlated, this may not matter. But they are not, so the choice of risk measure does matter: states where employers report the highest rates of non-fatal injuries have the lowest fatality Read More >
Posted on by 7 CommentsMaking Industry and Occupation Information Useful for Public Health: A guide to coding industry and occupation text fields
**This blog was updated on 3/19/2021 to reflect changes to NIOCCS.** This is the second blog in the series “COVID-19 Surveillance among Workers: What we know and what are we doing to learn more”. To learn more about occupation and industry data collection for acute infectious diseases, see the first blog Collecting occupation and Read More >
Posted on by 4 CommentsArtificial Intelligence Crowdsourcing Competition for Injury Surveillance
In 2018, NIOSH, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) contracted the National Academies of Science (NAS) to conduct a consensus study on improving the cost-effectiveness and coordination of occupational safety and health (OSH) surveillance systems. NAS’s report recommended that the federal government use recent advancements in machine Read More >
Posted on by 16 CommentsVisualizing National Worker Survey Data through Worker Health Charts
Anne is the CEO of a major hospital in a large metropolitan area. She is concerned by reports the Human Resources Department is receiving from employees about harassment and bullying. She understands that harassment and bullying can create a hostile work environment. With these concerns in mind, she includes questions about hostile work environment in Read More >
Posted on byUsing Worker Health Charts to Learn About Your Workplace
Jim manages a manufacturing plant that makes office furniture using plywood and other engineered wood products. Their worksite takes worker safety seriously, and is interested to know if the rate of severe injuries they are experiencing is high compared to injuries occurring at other office furniture manufacturing plants. This kind of information may be tricky Read More >
Posted on by 1 CommentCapturing Work-related Injuries from Emergency Department Data
Work-related injuries frequently occur, despite the fact that many are preventable. It is critical that we accurately describe and monitor these injuries in order to improve prevention efforts. Because there is no comprehensive data source that captures all work-related injuries, the occupational injury community relies on multiple sources to describe the problem. The occupational supplement Read More >
Posted on byUsing Occupation and Industry Information to Better Serve Your Patient Population
Conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play affect a wide range of health risks and outcomes. On average, American workers spend close to half their waking hours at work. As a result, work can have significant impacts on health. As electronic health records (EHRs) are replacing paper medical records in most Read More >
Posted on by 4 CommentsWorkplace Injury, Illness and Death- How do we know how many?
Workers Memorial Day, April 28, is a day to reflect on how work-related injuries, illnesses, and deaths affect American workers, their families and society at large. Each year at this time NIOSH reports on the burden of workplace injury and illness (see MMWR). But how do we know how many workers died or suffered Read More >
Posted on by 3 CommentsOccupational Exposure Limits – State of the Science
The process of developing and using occupational exposure limits is a cornerstone of industrial hygiene practice, with a history dating back to the 1880s. Occupational exposure limits, known as OELs, have not—until recently—evolved enough to reflect the advances in related sciences of toxicology, risk assessment, and exposure assessment. Much of the pioneering effort to Read More >
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