Category: Surveillance

Nonfatal Occupational Injury Surveillance Data: Examples from Michigan

The importance of developing a tracking system for occupational fatalities, injuries and illnesses was recognized in the original Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act of 1970. The Secretary of Labor at that time elected to delegate responsibility to collect, compile, and analyze occupational safety and health statistics. Despite the authority in the OSH Act to Read More >

Posted on by Kenneth D. Rosenman, MD; Mary Jo Reilly, MS; and Ling Wang, PhD

The State of Health Surveillance Across the Public Safety Sector

Surveillance is the cornerstone of public health practice, including in occupational safety and health (OSH). OSH surveillance systems have the ability to generate data that drives decision making and action.1, 2 There are multiple steps in a surveillance system including timely and accurate data collection; data quality monitoring; data management; data analysis; interpretation of results; Read More >

Posted on by Carol Brown, PhD; Suzanne M. Marsh, MPA; Susan M. Moore, PhD; and Meghan Kiederer, BA2 Comments

Work 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 Andrea L. Steege, PhD, MPH; Sharon Silver, MS, MA; Amy Mobley, MEn; and Marie Haring Sweeney, PhD, MPH2 Comments

Evaluation of the Characteristics of Workers Injured on the Job Requiring Hospitalization and Employer Compliance with OSHA’s Reporting Requirement for these Work-Related Hospitalizations

  Surveillance data is essential to identify and target prevention for all public health activity. Accurate and timely surveillance data are needed to identify causes of injury and illnesses, monitor prevention activity, plan interventions and evaluate the efficacy of these interventions. Unlike general public health surveillance, employers are a potential source of work-related injuries and Read More >

Posted on by Kenneth D. Rosenman, MD; Mary Jo Reilly, MS; and Ling Wang, PhD

100 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 Jennifer Cornell, JD; Stacey Marovich, MHI, MS; and Amy Mobley, MEn3 Comments

New 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 Andrea L. Steege, PhD, MPH; Amy Mobley, MEn; Rachael Billock, PhD, MSPH; Hannah Free, MPH; and Marie Haring Sweeney, PhD2 Comments

The Role of Demographics in the Future of Work

  The future of work continues to be shaped by ongoing changes in the workplace, work, and workforce. Shifting workforce demographics will present both opportunities and challenges for occupational safety and health (OSH). A central challenge will be ensuring the equitable distribution of work-related benefits and risks that accompany these transformations. To meet this challenge, Read More >

Posted on by Laura Syron, PhD, MPH; Marie-Anne S. Rosemberg, PhD, MN, RN, FAAOHN; Michael A Flynn, MA; Jacqueline Sivén, PhD, MA, MPH; Andrea Steege, PhD, MPH; Sara L. Tamers, PhD, MPH4 Comments

Changing 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 Mike Reh, BA; Rebecca Tsai, PhD; and Amy Mobley, MEn1 Comment

Improving 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 Audrey Reichard, MPH; and Suzanne Marsh, MPA2 Comments

NTOF: Understanding Worker Deaths through Surveillance

To accomplish the NIOSH mandate, “to assure so far as possible every man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources,” an accurate, comprehensive accounting of the number of workers who die at work is needed. These data help identify high-risk worker populations and describe the circumstances Read More >

Posted on by Suzanne Marsh, MPA

Making 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 Stacey Marovich, MHI, MS; Amy Mobley, MEn; and Matthew R. Groenewold, PhD4 Comments

Artificial 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 Sydney Webb, PhD; Carlos Siordia, PhD; Stephen Bertke, PhD; Diana Bartlett, MPH, MPP; and Dan Reitz16 Comments

Twenty–Nine Year Summary of Silicosis in Michigan

Silicosis is a lung disease caused by exposure to airborne silica. Generally, it causes scarring (pulmonary fibrosis) after 20 or more years of exposure. Since 1988, Michigan has been identifying individuals who develop silicosis with the goal of targeting prevention actions. Michigan’s system is both the longest running and only comprehensive surveillance system for silicosis Read More >

Posted on by Kenneth D. Rosenman, MD and Mary Jo Reilly, MS8 Comments

Visualizing 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 by Blair Carlin; CAPT Sara E. Luckhaupt, MD, MPH; and Amy Mobley, MEn

Arduous Duty: Using Three Data Sources to Create a Single Wildland Fire Fighter On-Duty Death Surveillance System

Wildland fire fighters are required to pass an “arduous duty” physical fitness test annually to help ensure that they are prepared for the physical nature of the job. Unlike structural fire fighting, wildland fire fighting often requires long work shifts that may last up to 14 continuous days, and often takes place in environments that Read More >

Posted on by CDR Christa Hale, LCDR Corey Butler, and Elizabeth Dalsey, M.A. 2 Comments

Capturing 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 by Audrey Reichard, Suzanne Marsh, and Rebecca Olsavsky

Workplace 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 Kerry Souza, ScD, MPH 3 Comments

Work-Related Amputations: Who’s Counting?

Knowing how many, who and where injuries or disease are occurring is a basic premise of preventing injuries and illnesses. If we don’t have accurate information on injury/illness occurrence, we don’t know how many resources to devote, what action(s) to take or whether the action we do take is effective. New findings from Michigan State Read More >

Posted on by Kenneth D. Rosenman M.D. 11 Comments

State-based Occupational Safety and Health Surveillance

How did NIOSH find out that cases of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (black lung) were on the rise after years of decline? The answer, state based occupational health surveillance.  Read More >

Posted on by Yvonne Boudreau, MD, MSPH, Liz Dalsey, MA, and Max Kiefer, MS, CIH2 Comments