OSHA, well past its infancy, but still learning how to count injuries and illnesses

Details

• Personal Author:
  Rosenman, Kenneth D.
• Description:
  Although it has been almost 50 years since the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act in 1970, concerns continue about the adequacy of the nation's occupational injury and illness surveillance system. Tracking of injuries and illnesses is a basic premise of prevention. Identification of industries and work groups with increased risk, determining which injuries and illnesses have the highest incidences, measuring trends over time, monitoring the effect of program activity, and ensuring that occupational injuries and illnesses receive their fair share of attention and resources depend on the ability to accurately and consistently measure the number and rate of injuries and illnesses. The importance of developing a tracking system for occupational injuries and illnesses was recognized in the original Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act of 1970, Pub. L. 91-596, 84 Stat 1590. The U.S. Secretary of Labor was authorized in Section 24 of the OSH Act to do the following: "(a) In order to further the purposes of this Act, the Secretary, in consultation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, shall develop and maintain an effective program of collection, compilation, and analysis of occupational safety and health statistics. Such program may cover all employments whether or not subject to any other provisions of this Act but shall not cover employments excluded by section 4 of the Act." The Secretary of Labor elected to delegate responsibility to collect, compile, and analyze occupational safety and health statistics to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in the Department of Labor. Despite the authority in the OSH Act to cover all workers, BLS elected to base their data collection program on an employer-based survey and supplementary workers' compensation data. The survey excludes the self-employed, workers on farms with 10 or fewer employees, private household workers, and Federal government workers (prior to 2008 all governmental workers were excluded). In the 1990's, BLS dropped the supplementary workers' compensation data, because it could only be obtained from a limited number of states. The BLS employer survey selects employers stratified by industries from the 44 states participating in the survey and sufficient employers from non-participating states to produce national estimates. State estimates are only provided for the participating states. Each case reported by an employer is weighted according to the stratified selection so as to allow extrapolation from the individual cases reported to a national estimate. Individual cases and weighting are maintained as confidential information. There appears to be a general consensus that the current BLS employer-based survey neither adequately estimates non-fatal occupational injuries nor occupational illnesses and "a more coordinated, cost-effective set of approaches for occupational safety and health surveillance is needed in the United States" [NAS, 2016]. A new National of Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Committee titled "Developing a Smarter National Surveillance System for Occupational Safety and Health in the 21st Century" was convened this year and is expected to issue a report by the end of 2017 [NAS, 2016]. The papers from NIOSH contribute to the knowledge about occupational injury surveillance by finding that the underreporting identified in the BLS employer survey is not secondary to underreporting by workers to their employers, whether or not Spanish is their preferred language, among workers with severe enough injuries to use the emergency department for treatment. This conclusion is limited by a poor response rate and the fact that volunteer workers, day laborers, and young and old workers were excluded from the NIOSH studies. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Health Care Facilities Workforce And Services Occupational Diseases Occupational Health Preventive Medicine Quality Control Safety
• Keywords:
  Author Keywords: Surveillance Data Processing Diseases Injuries Medical Monitoring Occupational Diseases Occupational Health Programs Occupational Safety And Health Administration Occupational Safety Programs OSHA Preventive Medicine Quality Assurance Quality Control Quality Standards Recording Systems Recordkeeping Records Management Statistical Analysis Statistical Quality Control Surveillance Surveillance Programs Underreporting Work-related Injuries

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• ISSN:
  0271-3586
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Cooperative Agreement
• Genre:
  Journal Article
• Place as Subject:
  Michigan ; OSHA Region 5
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Volume:
  59
• Issue:
  8
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20048258
• Citation:
  Am J Ind Med 2016 Aug; 59(8):595-599
• Contact Point Address:
  Kenneth D. Rosenman, MD, Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University, 909 Fee Road, 117 West fee Road, East Lansing, MI 48824
• Email:
  Rosenman@msu.edu
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2016
• Performing Organization:
  Michigan State University
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20050701
• Source Full Name:
  American Journal of Industrial Medicine
• End Date:
  20260630
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:0b5a142081ab08416b867ba33a85415fccc9ef03d790e156aea10eb2d3f6c12398cf77a18040985ee546bbad69e9630896e95273d76250d155e14ecef822cecb
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/203060/cdc_203060_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 130.52 KB ]