Advances and Current Themes in Occupational Health and Environmental Public Health Surveillance

Abstract

The essential purpose of public health surveillance is to monitor important health outcomes and risk factors and provide actionable information to practitioners, policy makers, researchers, and the public to prevent or ameliorate exposure, disease, and death. Although separate 1970s-era acts of Congress made possible the creation of modern occupational health and environmental public health surveillance, these acts also led to fragmented responsibilities and unconnected data across federal agencies. Having a well-defined purpose for systematically collecting relevant data is key, and state and local programs play a crucial role in conducting meaningful surveillance and connecting it with evidence-based outreach and interventions. Congress has directed monies to environmental public health surveillance and capacity has improved, yet no analagous funding has occurred to address the fragmentation found within occupational health surveillance. This article provides a review of the advances and important themes within occupational health and environmental public health surveillance over the past decade.

Surveillance Systems to Track and Evaluate Obesity Prevention Efforts

“…2, 19), refers to data collected from populations over two or more points in time. The term surveillance has traditionally meant assessment, i.e., characterizing the scale and distribution of a problem, but the term is increasingly used to refer to an overall decision-making cycle that includes collection, review, and use of the data to make appropriate changes in policy or programmatic efforts (58,96,101).…”

Fatal occupational injuries among U.S. law enforcement officers: A comparison of national surveillance systems

“…The systematic collection, tabulation, and interpretation of occupational injury and illness data are essential for setting priorities that achieve a safe and healthy workplace [Shire et al, 2011]. The systematic collection, tabulation, and interpretation of occupational injury and illness data are essential for setting priorities that achieve a safe and healthy workplace [Shire et al, 2011].…”

“…The surveillance of occupational injuries and illnesses is a critical component of the field of occupational safety and health. The systematic collection, tabulation, and interpretation of occupational injury and illness data are essential for setting priorities that achieve a safe and healthy workplace [Shire et al, 2011]. Surveillance of occupational injuries can take the form of workers' compensation systems, narrative text fields, police reports, trauma registries, self-report surveys, employer-developed incident reporting systems, national systems such as the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) and the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), or Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) logs [Friedman and Forst, 2007;Pollack et al, 2007;Sears et al, 2012;Utterback et al, 2012].…”

The prevalence of selected potentially hazardous workplace exposures in the US: Findings from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey

“…Little nationally representative information on US workplace hazard exposures is available. Additional national prevalence estimates of workplace exposures are needed to characterize current workplace exposures so that exposure reduction interventions can be appropriately targeted, and to assess the impact of the many changes in materials, processes, equipment, work practices, and the workforce that have taken place in the past several decades [Shire et al, 2011].…”