Workplace Health Surveillance

This is the first textbook that makes workplace health
surveillance accessible to a broad audience. Step-by-step,
it shows how to establish or improve a surveillance system.
The reader learns about defining objectives, seeking
organizational support, forming a surveillance workgroup,
collecting data, calculating basic injury and illness
statistics, designing databases, analyzing and interpreting
surveillance data, setting priorities, making protocols for
follow-up and case management, marketing results and giving
feedback, and evaluating surveillance systems. Links are
emphasized between surveillance and workplace follow-up,
community-based intervention programs, cost-benefit
analysis, and other prevention activities. Readers get a
solid foundation of epidemiologic concepts reinforced by
examples that use simple arithmetic. Leading practitioners
from government, business, and unions illustrate the
surveillance of injuries, lead poisoning, pesticide illness,
cumulative trauma disorders, asthma, noise-induced hearing loss, silicosis, cancer, and chemical and physical hazards.
Non-traditional data sources are examined, including health
and disability insurance, hospital discharge, and poison
control centers. Disability surveillance, return-to-work,
and the quality/effectiveness of health services also are
explored. Surveillance is shown to be an action-oriented
tool for decision-making that is the key to a successful
health and safety program.